


In Another Life

by TheWordsInMyHead



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But she has issues, F/M, Flashbacks, Harry Potter Never Went to Hogwarts, Mystery, POV Ginny Weasley, Romance, ginny weasley is a badass, so does Harry, we love them anyways
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:22:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 65,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23267656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWordsInMyHead/pseuds/TheWordsInMyHead
Summary: After the War, Ginny needed to get away, to escape her mistakes. Five years laters, she's back in England with a new chance at an old problem. Nothing about it is easy, but she never anticipated her biggest challenge to be the return of her mystery man from all those years ago and she certainly wasn't expecting him to turn out to be Harry Potter, her brother's friend and honorary Weasley.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 53
Kudos: 127





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Almost 5 months ago I started this story and now that it's nearly finished, I'd like to share it with all of you (or the 3 of you that are reading this, yay for you!). It's a journey, sometimes you'll want to yell at Ginny I'm sure, and Harry too, but at the end of the day, I hope you enjoy the story I've created. I'm pretty proud of it myself.
> 
> I'd like to take a minute to thank Meyers for being my number one cheerleader, I really don't know if this story exists without your constant encouragement and excitement. Thanks to Hannah for betaing these first couple chapters and fixing all my terrible grammar. And to all the writers in the Ginny Lovers Discord, you make me a better writer each and everyday. 
> 
> The rest of my Author's notes would be this long, hopefully... probably, maybe.
> 
> Updates on Sundays and Thursdays.

Ginny arrives back in the country much in the same way that she left it; quietly and with little fanfare. There’s no one waiting for her with excited greetings or warm embraces when she steps out of the Floo, and it’s exactly how she wants it. Needs it, really. 

Dusting the residual powder off her shoulders, she quickly and purposefully makes her way towards the check-in, shaking her head a little to clear it as she goes. There’s a line forcing her to wait, an unfortunate reoccurrence throughout this trip, which she does impatiently. She just wants this day to be over with already. 

Still, when she finally takes her place in front of the attendant, she makes sure to keep her face polite and impassive. At this point, she’s traveled through enough of these stations to know that showing annoyance is more likely to slow the process down than speed it up. 

The man carefully looks through her documentation and she can’t help but feel a knot of unease forming in her stomach. It’s been years since she utilized any name other than the one her parents gave her, yet she’s suddenly desperate for something to hide her true identity. Different documentation, a different face, different hair, anything to make her less noticeable.

Her discomfort is only increased by the fact that the attendant clearly recognizes the name on her paperwork, though really that shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Weasley has always been a well-known name, and its prominence has only grown in recent years as each of her brothers found their place in society and made their mark. 

Fortunately for Ginny’s nerves, he makes no comments about her, her family, or her extended absence. Not that he should. As sudden and unexpected as her departure was for her family, there was nothing all that usual about it. Lots of people left England in the months following the final battle, ready to make a new life away from memories of pain and loss. 

After that, everything progresses quickly and easily. She answers the standard questions, gives her prepared responses and is then on her way with a polite nod of her head. It’s a relief. 

But the relief is short lived. 

In the small waiting room, it was easy to forget where she was. The layout of them, the colours of the walls and even the barley suppressed boredom of the workers is all remarkably similar across the globe. It really doesn’t hit her that she’s home until she’s stepping out into the main lobby of the Ministry and then when it does, it hits her hard. 

Looking around the familiar space, she feels her heart rate start to speed up. She’s not sure why, but she expected to find the room changed. Part of her thinks it should have. It’s been nearly five years. She definitely has. 

Instead, it’s the exact same. Not the same as it was when Tom was at the height of his power, that would be ridiculous, but the same as how it looked when she’d come visit her father as a child. Same marble floor, same dull beige walls. Same art decorating the area. Same statue sitting over the fountain. For all she knows, it could be the same people, dressed in their same office attire passing her by. It’s like time has stood still here. Like those awful years never existed in the first place. 

Instead of being filled with peace, as she assumes was the purpose and not a total lack of originality, Ginny feels the tight knot of dread which she had valiantly been trying to push down since she left her little home, rise to the surface. 

She’s better now, not the shell of a person she was when she left, but in that moment, she doesn’t feel like it. The tension that she used to carry around like a second skin feels heavy as it settles back onto her. She looks at the people around her and all of her old frustrations come back like they never left. They are so oblivious, walking around with their heads held high, unbothered by the price some people had to pay to give them that freedom. 

For a moment, she lets herself wonder if coming back was a terrible idea. A second of hesitation that she doesn’t often allow herself and really, it’s not like she thought through the decision all that much. 

_Three months here, and twice as many in this region, and she still hasn’t managed to adjust to this hot and sticky climate. Leaning over, Ginny desperately tries to catch a hint on the breeze coming through the open window, but it’s no use._

_No, half a dozen fans and every available fixture opened and it’s still hot as hell in here._

_With a resigned sigh, she flops back against her hammock bed. She’ll just have to wait for the sun to go down to be productive. Closing her eyes, she tries to let the gentle swaying sooth her agitation._

_When she opens them again a few minutes later it’s still just as unpleasantly hot, but at least now she isn’t as tempted to start blowing things up. Not that there’s all that much to destroy._

_Unconsciously her eyes wander the small space. There isn’t much to see; over the years she’s got good at limiting her number of personal possessions, but still, it’s her home. Her house, even if it is really nothing more than a hut in the wilderness._

_She’s been in this place for over six months now, the longest she’s stayed in any single dwelling for a long time, probably since Hogwarts. There’s a comfort in that, in being able to visualize her surroundings in her mind with ease._

_Still, when her eyes land on today’s crumpled paper sitting on her desk/table/nightstand, the urge to move on is just as strong as ever._

Let’s try for something a little cooler this time, _she thinks to herself, stretching to grab the paper rather than attempt to find her wand where it fell onto the ground some time ago._

_Paper successfully in hand, she quickly flips to the job section, having no desire to read through a likely incredibly biased account of current events. Once she’s located the correct section, she tosses the others aside with no regard for where they fall._

_Carefully, she reads down the page, making a list in her head as she goes. Some, she discounts as soon as she sees them, knowing that they aren’t that type that will hire her without her having any formal experience, despite her undeniable skills. Others, she marks down as possibilities only because she knows that there aren’t a ton of options._

_On and on she goes, nonchalantly moving down the list until she sees something that makes her blood run cold despite the sweltering heat._

Looking for an experienced Curse Breaker to examine and explore a newly revealed underground passageway at Blishwick Manor.

Serious inquiries only, please contact Coby Williams. 

_Her cozy home disappears before her eyes and all she can see is Blishwick Manor as it stood when she saw it last. Memories of the Manor, of Deatheaters crowded into the main hall and the frantic chase to find answers before time ran out, flash before her eyes._

_She thought that the case was closed. No, she knows that the case was closed. When the heat of the final battle faded away and suspicious individuals started to be questioned, the Aurors searched it. She knows that they searched the house because she was the one to make sure that it was on their list. Which is also how she knows that they came up empty handed._

_There was nothing to be found, not by them and not by her._

_That’s why she left. Or at least one of the reasons. After all that time, the feeling of hopelessness weeks later when those answers were finally deemed unattainable was just too much._

_Shaking her head to remove the ghosts of her past, she tries to focus on the present. The implications of the information race through her mind. There’s something more to be found. There’s a chance again._

A hasty decision indeed. One second, her biggest problem is the unbearable heat and the next, she’s packing up her few belongings and traversing the international Floo back to England, diving head first into a situation that she left for good reason without a second of thought. 

_You could just leave_ , a dark voice inside her head reminds her and she could. She could return back to the safety and comfort of her new life. No one even knows she’s here yet; there wouldn’t be anyone to disappoint. Maybe she’s better off leaving the past in the past. She has lived the last five years not really understanding what happened, why should she put herself through this all now? Especially since it’s a very thin lead at best. 

Standing there, in the middle of the Atrium, Ginny forces herself to stop and make a choice, stay or go. 

Years ago, she would have just pushed herself to keep going, damn the consequences. She was reckless and impulsive with a singular razor sharp focus. She was who she had to be and she doesn’t regret it even if all it got her was a downward spiral that started with her fleeing from the Burrow in the middle of the night with nothing but a rushed note in explanation and ended with her waking up alone in an empty bed.

Now she’s more careful, at least most of the time. She thinks things through, methodically considering all the options in front of her before moving forward. It’s something that she should have done before ever leaving her jungle sanctuary. 

Ginny pauses in the Ministry atrium, surrounded by people going about their day, with the hard stone floor beneath her feet and the magical sunshine filtering down on her face, to do that now.

In the end though, it doesn’t matter, there’s really no choice. Despite her willingness to leave it all alone, she can’t dismiss the nagging feeling in her gut. Plus, she’s never been able to just walk away, not when it really mattered and she can’t help feeling like this really matters. 

So instead of walking back, she moves forward.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
Once the decision is made, most of Ginny’s anxiety dissipates. She’s always done better when there’s a clear path in front of her. It’s the moments in between, the brief flashes of infinite possibilities that gets her.

Still, she takes a moment to gather herself, heading towards the exit into Muggle London rather than directly Flooing to the Burrow like she originally planned. 

Walking around helps ease some of the tension from her shoulders, it’s familiar ground, but not really. In all of her years traveling here to catch the train to school, first for her brothers and then eventually for herself, she only remembers one trip into this part of the city. It was the day they dropped Ron off. 

She remembers being heartbroken, and desperate. More than anything she wanted to join her brothers on their adventures, she was so eager to grow up. Looking back now, she realizes how foolishly naïve she was. Less than a year later, she would already have the diary in her possession and that childhood she wished to escape would be gone, never to return. 

Despite the darkness looming over the horizon, that day had been good. Her father took one of his rare days off work and they wandered around the city just the two of them . They went to a museum and she spent hours listening to her father talk about the Muggle world with a grin on her face, happy to have his undivided attention for maybe the first time in her life. Then later, after a busy day, they stopped to get ice cream cones at a place her father told her in hushed whispers was they very best in the whole world. 

Sitting on the grass of one of the many parks, Ginny tries to focus on memories like that, to remind herself of all the things she’ll be gaining by coming back rather than dwell on the control that she can already feel slipping away. 

She watches the people around her. A young family at the park, an elderly couple strolling hand in hand, a group of friends playing football in the field across the way, and feels a wave of peace wash over her. It’s not surprising that she feels more comfortable here, a lot of her first year away was spent in the company of Muggles. 

In so many ways, their world is simpler. Even though they undoubtedly felt the effects of the war as much as their Wizard counterparts, they seemed to have bounced back faster. Sometimes she wonders if there is more to be had in remaining ignorant than having knowledge. With knowledge comes responsibility, and she’s not sure that having the knowledge is ever worth the responsibility that comes along with it. At least in her case. 

For a while she sits, letting the warm noon day sun chase away the ghosts of the past, until eventually, she feels recharged enough to face the next obstacle. Not that seeing her family is a hardship necessarily, it’s just that it’s another item on the long list of things she decided not to deal with when she left. 

Finding an abandoned corner to Apparate from is easy, maybe a little easier than Ginny would have liked. With a final glance around and another calming deep breath, Ginny turns on the spot, the image of the lane leading up to the Burrow as clear in her mind as the day she left.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
“Dang bloody time zones,” Ginny curses when she lands and sees the Burrow overflowing with people.

While it was only Saturday morning when she began her adventure home, the perils of international Floo and a nearly 12 hour time change puts it just past noon in England, right in time for the traditional Weasley Sunday lunch. _So much for coming in under the radar_ , she thinks bitterly. 

Although it would be easy, she doesn’t let the new revelation slow her steps. She’s already spent more than enough time hesitating and unsure today. It’s time for her to embrace her path with confidence, to become the Ginny that she used to be before life and circumstances tore her down. 

It only takes her a moment to reach the gate, where she quickly gains the attention of one of the kids playing in the yard. It’s a relief to realize that none of the adults are outside. Kids, she can handle. All she is going to receive from them is curiosity and maybe a little suspicion. Nothing close to the hostility she might face from her brothers and parents. 

“Hello,” she says, stepping through the gate and then tentatively crouching down to the small child’s height. 

The child takes her outstretched hand easily with an unreserved trust that she hasn’t experienced in a long time. “I’m Domi.”

Before she gets the opportunity to respond, another girl around the same age steps around the trees lining the property and into view, eyeing Ginny with the wariness she initially expected. 

“Domi, what are you doing? You shouldn’t be talking to strangers.”

Although she can't be more than three feet tall, she has an air of pompous disapproval, standing there with her little arms crossed, glaring at the other girl. Her posture, her attitude seems so achingly familiar. She must be Percy’s daughter. 

“Molly, it's fine,” Domi responds impatiently, confirming Ginny’s suspicions. “She’s inside the fence, she can’t be bad.” 

Molly scrunches up her face a little, trying to think the problem though, “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Yes it is!” Domi tells her insistently. 

Eventually another child appears, breaking up the argument and drawing the girls’ attention. Unlike the other two, Ginny is easily able to place this child. Victoire looks almost exactly like her mother, walking towards them with an effortless grace that Ginny is positive she didn’t have at five and isn’t sure she has even now. At least anywhere besides in a duel. 

Lost in her thoughts, she doesn’t realize that the focus has shifted to her until Molly asks, “well what do you think?” gesturing to Ginny, “Domi shouldn’t have been talking to her, right?”

“That’s not a stranger, that’s aunt Ginny.” Victoire says easily glancing at Ginny over her shoulder only to do a double take. “It’s aunt Ginny! I got to get Daddy.” 

It’s only as she watches a fully walking, talking Victoire run back towards the house that she truly feels how long she’s been away. Rationally, she knows how much she’s missed, countless birthdays and holidays, Percy’s wedding, Fred and George’s unexpected elopements. The birth of her nieces and nephews. She’s missed a lot. Too much. 

Within minutes Bill emerges over the horizon led by an impatient Victiore. 

“Come on,” Ginny can hear her urging her father as they round the final bend, “you’re going to want to see this.”

"Yeah,” he says affectionately, “what did you girls find?”

Victoire busts through the trees blocking Ginny from view and then spreads her arms wide. “See!”

“Ginny?” he asks astonished, the easy smile dropping off his face. 

“Yeah, it’s me” she tells him even though there’s really no reason, today she looks very nearly the same as the day she left. 

“What are you doing here?” he asks and Ginny can’t help but wince internally. She knew there was a possibility of not receiving a warm welcome, but honestly, she didn’t really think it would happen. Still, if there was going to be anyone who held onto resentment over the way she left, it would be Bill. 

She knows that her leaving was hard on all of her family, particularly him. As the youngest and the oldest, they have always had a special bond, but it was more than that too. Out of everyone, he was the only one who actually caught a glimpse of what her life was really like. While everyone else got straight up lies, a façade of the girl they wanted to see, he got partial lies and half-truths. 

Sometimes, she thinks that made it all harder. The fact that he knew there was a problem, but that he couldn’t do anything to help. That when it came down to it, she didn’t trust him enough to let him all the way in. 

“I’m home,” she says simply, shrugging. There’s no other answer to give. 

But apparently that wasn’t the right response because he makes no further attempt at discussion. The silence drags on and the tension between them grows. They are trapped in a stalemate; the Weasley stubbornness in its purest form. 

She’s not going to make excuses for her behaviour, today or all those years ago and she’s not going to apologize. Doing so isn’t going to change anything that happened. And really, she doesn’t want to change anything. She did what she did because it’s what she knew needed to be done. She can’t live with regrets; she won’t. 

“Daddy?” a little voice asks confused at the odd tension growing between the reunited siblings. 

That seems to break Bill out of whatever trance he was in because one moment he’s staring her down like she’s someone to be wary of and the next he’s moving to hug her like he had no hesitations in the first place. 

It’s confusing, to say the least, but she accepts the embrace easily, falling into his large arms as she had so many times before. She holds on a little harder than necessary, childhood memories of safety and comfort flashing through her mind. 

Merlin, she missed him. Part of her wants to just stay right in this moment forever where it’s easy to believe in a better world, one where good always triumphs over evil; where happily ever afters exist and fighting villains doesn’t come with a cost. 

He lets out a gentle sign, quiet enough that their audience won’t hear it, “I really am glad you’re home, Firefly.”

She just nods against his chest, unsure or maybe unable to say anything. 

“Come on, let’s go inside. I’m sure everyone else wants to see you,” Bill says, eventually pulling out of the hug slightly to toss his arm over her shoulder.

Led by a train of children, he directs her towards the house.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
“Where’s Dad?” Ginny asks when the chaos dies down. Seeing everyone again has been great, better than she hoped for after the oddness of her reunion with Bill, if not a little overwhelming. Almost since the moment she walked into the familiar kitchen, she’s been surrounded by people, family members both old and new ving for her attention, but through it all there’s been one notable absence. To be honest, she’s starting to get concerned. She hadn’t heard of anything happening to her father, but that is also not the kind of news you send in a letter.

“Oh, of course, yes.” Mrs. Weasley says wiping her eyes one more time on her apron and then pulling it off, “he was out in the shed with Harry earlier…. I’ll just run and get him.” 

She watches her Mum’s retreating figure with an uncomfortable mix of emotions. If she’s honest with herself, she knew that there was going to be tears from her Mum, still, she’s thrown by the amount of emotions they all have shown at her return. Logically, she knows that she was missed, their regular letters to her were proof of that enough, but she had convinced herself that they were fine without her. Now through, seeing their reactions first hand, she’s forced to confront the very real truth that she hurt them leaving and more by staying gone. 

As she struggles to come to terms with the damage her actions caused to, not only her family, but also herself, everyone else drifts out of the cramped kitchen until it’s only her brothers left scattered around the space with her. 

It’s awkward for a moment, no one quite sure what to say. She should have expected it, five years it a long time, especially when they didn’t know her all that well in the years before that either, but it’s jaring. Still, she squares her shoulders and braces herself for whatever is coming. She might not have come back here with the intention of getting her old relationship with her brothers back, but now that she’s here, there’s nothing she wants more than to fix whatever she might have broken between them.

The silence ligners, feeling particularly suffocating in the normally loud space, until Fred breaks it with a dramatic sigh. Looking first at George and then to her, he asks, “Did you bring me back anything?”

After that the tension is broken. 

Percy mutters under his breath, “Honestly, how old are you?”

Ron turns to her, eyes matching Fred’s expectant expression. Even Bill lets out an unexpected laugh. 

She just shakes her head, a wry grin threatening to find its way onto her face. It’s good to be home. 

“You’ve never met Harry, right?” Ron asks her with a snicker before turning to look at George with a glint in his eye. 

She shakes her head slowly, warily, the tingly feeling of an imminent prank pricking the back of her neck. 

“You wouldn’t have,” Percy adds helpfully, “he didn’t go to Hogwarts.”

“This is going to be good,” Fred remarks, nudging George. 

“Oi, Harry!” Ron yells loud enough to be heard across the property. 

“Was that really necessary,” Percy complains, “you are a Wizard, there are much more effective ways.”

“Now just remember to stay calm,” Ron teases her, ignoring Percy completely, “he’s only a person, same as you and me.”

Ginny just rolls her eyes and gives him the finger which only serves to rile up the rest of them more. The thing is, 7-year-old Ginny would be shaking with excitement at the prospect of meeting Harry Potter, but 23-year-old Ginny has no feelings about the Boy Who Lived other than a vague annoyance that the person who was supposed to be the saviour of the Wizarding World only entered the fighting at the very end of the last battle. 

She doesn’t care about Harry Potter one way or another, but the camaraderie with her brothers is something that she wasn’t sure she’d ever really get back. Even Bill has joined in, relegating the group with stories of her childhood obsession. So she embraces the mocking with cursing and threats, of course.

A dark haired man pokes his head around the corner interrupting Bill’s recounting of the time she married ‘Harry’. “You called?”

“Yeah mate, come meet the long lost Weasley sister.”

Harry steps further into the room with his hand outstretched in greeting, but Ginny makes no move to take it. She can’t, her vision is narrowed down to his face. A face which she recognizes, one she knows intimately and definitely not from her picture books.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s only years of quickly reacting to ever changing situations that gets Ginny through the next couple of minutes. After a brief stumble, which judging by the snickering behind her, her brothers just amount to lingering hero worship, she accepts his hand. 

His skin is warm against hers, rough in a way that most Wizard’s aren’t and it sends her into a spiral of memories. His hand leading her through crowded streets, ghosting down her bare back, clenched in her hair. Even after all these years, his touch still sends shock waves of familiarity through her body. If she had any doubts whatsoever that somehow she was mistaken and he isn’t her mystery man from years ago, they vanish in an instant.

As she shakes his hand, desperately trying to not let her shakiness show, she searches his eyes for some sort of recollection, any hint that maybe he recognizes her too. But there’s nothing, not even a glint. All she finds is a sort of wary friendliness that comes from being introduced to someone unfamiliar, but important for the first time.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, pulling his hand back slowly, confirming her suspicions. She tips her head towards him in acknowledgment and agreement, not trusting her voice come out steady. Really, it’s all she can do to not react to the rumble of his voice so close to her ear. 

Now that she’s put the pieces together, it’s unbelievable that she didn’t recognize him from sound alone. It may not have been long, but in their time together, the sound of his voice had become as familiar to her as that of her closest friends. Not that she actually has any close friends. 

Her thoughts spin around in her head, a mess of fragmented emotions and long forgotten dreams. Panic starts to build again, the sounds of the kitchen fading into the background. When she came back, she expected to encounter many challenges, but she’d never once thought he’d be one of them. She wasn’t prepared for him to be one of them. 

Fortunately, before she has a chance to completely lose her grip on reality and potentially make an even bigger fool of herself, her Mum reappears, her Dad following closely behind. With the bang of the back door closing and the sound of her Father’s voice, she is able to shift her focus enough to slow her heart rate and regulate her breathing. 

Reuniting with her Dad is everything she hoped it would be. She hugs him tight, happily answering questions about her life and asking her own in return. Together, they sit at the kitchen table and for a few moments he is able to hold her attention. That is until she catches sight of Harry out of the corner of her eye and then she’s distracted again. 

Her thoughts race as she listens to her Dad talk, trying to make sense of the situation. Her heart threatens to lose its steady rhythm. She has to continually fight off the urge to run far, far away before it’s too late, even though she knows that it is already too late. 

Yet, through it all she chats with easily about the current Quidditch standings, makes funny faces to amuse the younger children and eats some reheated lunch at her mother’s urging. To the outside world everything is fine, she’s that same slightly cynical, sarcastic, Ginny that they have always known.

Or at least to most of the world. She can’t help but notice how closely Bill is watching her. Closer than he ever did back during her school days, when appearing completely present in one situation while letting her mind wander was second nature; when it was the only way she managed to make it through summer breaks without losing her carefully constructed calm.

Back then, she knows that she fooled him as much as everyone else more often than not, especially in the early years of the war. Now though, she’s not so confident. Now, all she can do is hope that he hasn’t noticed how her eyes keep drifting back to Harry, sitting in the living room talking to George as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. If he has though, she’ll just have to deal with it later. For now, she’s trapped in a sea of memories, comparing the man sitting before her today to the one she met all those years ago.

_The first time she sees him there are no sparks, no moment of inherent rightness, she actually walks right past him. The bar and the promise of numbness, far more appealing than a random man sitting in the shadows._

_She finds a seat easily, sliding onto a stool and ordering a gin and tonic with practiced ease; the drink another unexpected benefit of hiding out in the Muggle world. She downs the first glass and then another, savoring the burn. She sits there, idly tapping her fingers against the bar until the nearly constant buzzing of regret and guilt in her head finally starts to fade back into a dull thump._

_It’s only then that she looks up to survey the room around her for the first time. There’s the aforementioned man in the shadows, a couple over at the tables and a loud, drunk group of men blatantly checking her out a couple seats down._

Great, _she thinks, already exhausted._

_With the establishments that she tends to frequent, their type of behavior is not all that unexpected. For the most part, she’s fine with it. If she’s looking for solitude, she’ll just ignore them. If she’s looking to forget and alcohol isn’t doing the trick, she’ll wink at them, get them to pay for her drinks and then let one of them take her home (or somewhere more convenient)._

_On a normal day, their crude remarks and vulgar hand gestures wouldn’t bother her, but today, well today isn’t just any day. Still, she bites back her annoyance, clutching onto the glass in her hand, she wills herself to stay calm._

_That thought lasts about five minutes until one of the men gets the courage, or rather bluster, to approach her. She takes one smell of his alcohol stained breath and spins out of her seat, walking towards the exit before he can even get a word out._

_It’s easy to tell, as she steps out of the bar into its adjacent alleyway, that the men are following her. Part of her is annoyed at their intrusion, she was enjoying her drink. Part of her is angry, how dare they try to corner an unsuspecting young woman in a dark alley. But most of her is excited. This isn’t what she hoped for walking out, but it’s the option she most prefers. The honest truth is that the only time she truly feels alive nowadays is when she’s fighting someone._

_Having no desire to break the statue of secrecy. though, she waits until the first man is right behind her to make her move, glad, once again, that she took the time to hone her skills in muggle fighting in addition to practicing spell work._

_Unfortunately, she never gets the chance to hit her mark._

_Behind her she hears a thump._

_And then another._

_And another._

_She whips around startled and her eyes land on the man from the bar, his face still as obscured as the first time she spotted him. On the ground around him are the three men lying in various levels of distress._

_“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” she asks the mysterious man. Her annoyance, making the British curse slip out unconsciously._

_“Uhh saving you.” His breathing is heavy and ragged, but it does nothing to hide the incredulous tone of his question._

_"And who says I needed help?”_

_He looks between her, standing at just over five feet with her arms crossed defiantly across her chest, and the three tall, bulky men moaning on the ground and raises his eyebrow as though her question is too ridiculous to justify a response._

_“I didn’t need your help,” she tells him again forcefully, glaring to make sure her message is received._

_For a minute, he looks like he’s about to argue the point, and part of her hopes he does; she was really looking forward to a fight and at this point she’d happily take whatever kind of release she can get. Unfortunately, he must see something of her eagerness in her face because instead he raises his hands in a placating gesture._

Who the hell does he think he is?

_He remains in that position, a cocky grin on his face while she keeps her eyes locked on him, suddenly the more interesting subject. They remain in that position, eyeing each other with equal parts disdain and interest as the offenders pull themselves together and scurry away._

_With a final nod in her direction, the smirk still firmly planted, he finally turns to leave as the footsteps of the men fade into the distance. She waits to give him the finger until he starts to turn away, but judging by the amused huff that she hears, he sees it anyway._

_That’s the end of it. Or at least that’s what she thinks until she reaches down and realizes that her bag, with all of her money, the little amount she’s rationed and saved, is missing. She lets out a string of curses that would make even the fat lady blush._

_She’s still searching her pockets trying to locate this missing purse, hoping against hope that she just misplaced it, when the shadow falls over her._

_Looking up she sees the man from before, his face finally more illuminated from this angle and she has to suppress a grimace._ See Ginny, _she hears a voice in her head that sounds remarkably like her Mother_ , that’s why we shouldn’t be rude to kind strangers.

_“Is everything alright?” The cockiness from before is completely gone, replaced with a genuine concern that has her thrown._

_“It's fine,” she bites out, at least attempting to be polite despite her frustration._

_He just watches her patiently, his steady green eyes holding her hostage, until she forces herself to look away, afraid of what she might reveal if she maintained the connection any longer. As it is, she still finds herself explaining the missing money and the problem that it poses. For some inexplicable reason, she trusts him not to take advantage of the situation. That thought alone would normally have sent her running._

_Nervously rubbing the back of his neck, he tells her, “I’ve got a place just a few streets away… you’re welcome to stay the night.”_

_In an instant, her guard is back up. That’s the type of offer she has come to expect from the world. Kindness doesn’t come without a cost._

_“What’s in it for you?” she asks warily. She may be willing to pay the price, but not without first knowing what it is._

_He just shrugs and she narrows her eyes suspiciously. “Maybe I’m just lonely.”_

_Her eyes go wide, most people aren’t that blunt about it, not that she can say she minds. At least this way, she knows what she’s getting into._

_For a second, he seems confused by her reaction, and then his face starts to turn red in the dim light._

_“Blimey! Not like that! I mean, there’s only the one bed… but there’s a couch. I plan to take the couch. Or you could have the couch.”_

_She watches him fumble trying to find the words, barely hiding her amusement._

_“Please stop me.”_

_She just raises an eyebrow, “but I thought you were lonely?”_

_“Lonely as is in, I used to live with a bunch of people and now the house is too quiet,” he explains with a sigh, perhaps not realizing that she was just taking the mickey._

_His explanation rings a little too familiar, and she’s barely able to repress a shutter. It would be impossible to count the number of times she’s sat in a dingy motel room over the last six months missing the noise of the Burrow or Hogwarts, even though she has no desire to be back there. Against all odds, she feels her connection to him growing at his confession._

_Plus he’s cute, charming in an unassuming way and she has just enough buzz remaining to make it seem like a good idea. Still. it wouldn’t do to give in too easily._

_“I was taught not to go home with strange men,” she tells him flirtatiously, lightening the suddenly morose atmosphere with an over exaggerated bat of her eyelashes._

_This time, her humor lands. Letting out a huff of laughter, he shakes his head like he knows she’s trouble and that he’d be better off walking away, but he can’t resist. “You’re telling me that you could take down those three burly men easily, but I’m a threat?”_

_He raises his arms wide and spins slowly, the street lights in the distance highlighting him as he moves._

_“See? Practical harmless,” he tells her with a crooked grin._

_Yeah, she doubts that. His wand was easy enough to see, tucked into the back of his pants, as he turned unaware that a small stick of wood would mean anything to a random girl in a Muggle bar. Despite it all, she feels an inexplicable pull towards him. He intrigues her, he excites her._

_Plus, she’s still pretty sure she could take him in a fight. If there was one benefit to everything, the war, the fighting, it made her strong. Before the dark thoughts can take hold, however, she moves towards him. “Lead the way”_   


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
It’s only once she’s back in her room, surrounded by all of her old things, that Ginny lets the bizarreness of the situation overwhelm her. The rest of the visit was fine, good even, in a lot of ways, but it was also a mess. Or maybe it’s just her who’s the mess.

Sliding onto the floor between her bed and the wall, she curls her legs up against her chest and lets her head fall against her knees. She didn’t think she’d ever see him again and she can’t decide if she’s happy now that she has or disappointed. Maybe a bit of both. She’s definitely frustrated. 

His sudden reappearance throws another variable into an already complex situation, as if coming back wasn’t already challenging enough. She lifts her head slightly to look around her childhood room; it’s strangely unfamiliar despite the fact that she knows nothing has been done to it during her extended absence. It only serves to remind her just how out of it she was the last time she was here, when she finally decided she’d had enough, thrown a few belongings into a bag, scribbled a note and left. 

She brings her hands up to her head, pushing her palms against her eyes so tightly that the world turns to black. 

_Why doesn’t he recognize me?_ She wonders with a groan. She already signed on to solve one long forgotten mystery coming back here, she doesn’t need another one.

The thought flits through her head and then out again before she can grasp on to it. No matter what she tries to do, she can’t seem to settle her mind.. One second the stress of being home again threatens to consume her, then the next, she's barely able to quell her anxiety about the job waiting for her on Tuesday and the answers she might find there. Only for it to come back to Harry. 

She runs her hand through her hair, telling herself furiously to get a grip. Her thoughts are all over the place, her emotions aren’t much better and that’s a dangerous place to be. She needs to regain control before everything spirals out of her reach.

Almost unconsciously, her eyes settle on her bag placed neatly in the corner of her room and then without another thought, she’s pushing herself up onto her feet and walking over to the backpack. Even though it’s been years since she last took this particular object out, she’s able to find it easily. 

She lets the cold glide of the metal stag slide across her skin grounding her. It’s not what she intended when she took it with her all those years again, not in the slightest, but she finds that it works surprisingly well. 

Twirling the key chain around on her finger, she walks back over to the bed, trying to put her thoughts in order. With the stag in her hand, it’s nearly impossible to not feel the memories of their time together pressing in, but she keeps them at the edge of her consciousness; there, but not really. It’s how she's dealt with memories of him for as long as they've been there. Actually, it’s how she deals with memories of a lot of things, even though she’s trying to be better. 

Pushing away the reflection for later, she decides to focus on the Harry issue. It’s the freshest of her problems and the only one she might actually have a hope of solving if she thinks on it long enough.

With her mind clearer, she keeps coming back to one thought over and over.He should have recognized her; he should have recognized her long before she ever came home. Her face is scattered throughout this house, and while most of the photos are of her younger years, there’s definitely a good few that should have been enough to identify her even with a different hair colour.

She’s annoyed that her mind instantly jumps to a memory charm. They’re not at war anymore, an attack shouldn’t be her instant response and yet, it still is. Knowing who he truly is now, the possibility seems even more likely. _It’s possible that erasing her wasn’t even the goal of the wipe_ , her mind argues. What was he doing halfway across the continent 4 years ago? Just weeks before the first anniversary of the final battle.

The more she thinks about it, the more questions she has. He’s been appearing in letters from her family for years now which means he came back to the country not long after they parted. What pulled him half way across Europe and what pulled him back?

And it’s not just the timeline that’s confusing her, she’s having a hard time reconciling the man that she thought she knew, however brief their time together, and all she’s learned about Harry Potter over the years. It just doesn’t make sense. 

They seem like two completely different people. 

Her thoughts are interrupted by a gentle knock on her door, giving her only a few seconds' notice to bury the stag in the pocket of her jumper and replace her mask of calm, before the door opens revealing her mother. 

“Have you got everything you need?” her Mum offers softly, “I could whip up something quick if you’re still hungry?” 

She shakes her head in the negative quickly. The reality is that she has much more than she needs, much more than she’s gotten used to having, but her Mum doesn’t need a picture of how poorly she lived for those first couple of years. 

Yet, even after her response, she still lingers in the door. Another moment passes full of hesitation, and then she seems to steal her resolve, stepping into the room and sitting lightly on the edge of the bed beside her. It’s startling for Ginny to see her mother acting cautiously, especially around her. It doesn’t make sense. Molly Weasley isn’t cautious, she’s loud and bold and often a little too pushy.

Her Mum takes some time to gather her thoughts, another surprising difference, and while she does that, Ginny takes a moment to really see her Mother. She’s aged, a lot. Her once vibrant red hair is now mostly grey, the lines on her face are deeper, more prominent. It makes sense, Bill is in his mid 30’s, she should look this way, but still it’s shocking for Ginny. She doesn’t know when it happened, was it slow, over the years she missed, or sudden, right after she left? Or was it while she was still here, at the height of the war, and she just never noticed because she was too wrapped up in her own world?

“I know that we’ve never been very close, that you’ve always felt better confiding in other people, Bill, your friends, your dad, he says it’s because we are too much alike and that’s fine--”

Ginny starts to object, but she cuts her off with a raised hand.

“Just let me finish okay,” she says with a wobbly smile. “We haven’t been close, but I just want to say that if you ever need someone to talk to— I still don’t quite understand what happened back then and I don’t need to— I just want you to know that if it ever gets back to that place again, you can come to me and we’ll figure it out… I don’t ever want to go that long without seeing you again.”

She can see the tears leaking out of the corner of her Mum’s eyes, but doesn’t comment. She can’t through the lump in her throat. She hasn’t cried in a long time and she’s not going to now, even though part of her wishes that she could. That matching tears could fall down their cheeks, that they could embrace and everything broken between them would be fixed in an instant.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Still, she feels a little piece of something heal inside of her when her Mum pulls her into her arms for a hug.  
“I’m so glad you’re home dear,” her Mum says gently, patting her hair like she used to do when she was young, “I’ve missed you terribly.”

“Me too,” she answers softly from her place pressed against her Mum’s shoulder. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do about Harry, what she should tell him, if she should tell him, but for now she lets herself enjoy the moment. If life has taught her one thing, it’s that they don’t normally last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Chapter 3 on Sunday.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m sorry that this is going up so late, but hey, at least it’s still Sunday! The reality is that I’m new at this and I really underestimated the amount of time that it takes me to edit each of these chapters for you. With that in mind, I’m going to step it back to only posting on Sundays. Thanks for understanding. 
> 
> Okay, boring message over and on to the fun stuff! I hope you like this chapter, it has one of my favourite scenes, It was one of the first things I wrote for the story.

The sun is high in the sky by the time Ginny emerges from her bedroom the next morning, well rested despite the disorder of her thoughts the night before. Exiting her room, the smell of coffee and freshly baked bread hits her life a wave, guiding her way down the creaky stairs. She sees both of her parents the minute she rounds the corner to the kitchen and in an instant she's transported back in time, the picture of them chatting quietly reminiscent of her childhood. The image lasts for a brief moment, perfect in its simplicity, but then she blinks and it all falls away. 

“Sleep well, Pumpkin,” her Dad greets her kindly when he sees her lingering in the doorway.

“Oh Ginny, good, you’re up,” her Mother remarks at the greeting, turning from her position in front of the stove. 

“Hmmm,” she mumbles sleepily in response to both statements.

Normally, she’s a light sleeper, slow to close her eyes and then instantly awake the minute they’re open. It was a necessity for so long that now, even when the option for a long lie in exists, she’s rarely comfortable enough to take advantage. Something about the Borrow, though, the familiar smells and noises, must have reawakened that ability within her. For that, she’s incredibly grateful. Even as the fog of sleep persists, her mind feels clearer than it has in a long time; her body more rested.

She grabs a mug from the same cupboard that they’ve always been and fills it with coffee still warm on the table.

“What are you making?” she asks her Mum, sipping her drink from her customary seat at the large table.

“Oh, just getting some things ready for dinner tonight,” she responds casually as her Dad hides behind his newspaper. 

Ginny takes in the numerous pots bubbling on the stove and the even more lining the counter, a sinking feeling in her stomach. “Dinner tonight?” 

“Yes. Your welcome home party.” She answers the question easily, as though it is the most obvious answer in the world, but underneath is a clear reminder that there’s no use arguing. “Everyone is coming.”

“Everyone?” Ginny asks, trying to keep her voice even and calm, but failing miserably.

“Yes, everyone,” she responds in a matching tone.

“But they all saw me yesterday!” 

Ginny winces the moment the complaint leaves her mouth, not just because she knows that it’s the wrong way to combate her Mum’s ideas, but because it gives away too much of what she wants to keep hidden. 

“Yes, but by the time you arrived almost everyone had to leave,” she retorts dismissively.

Her Mum’s easy answer sends a shiver of dread racing down her spine, the warmth of the sun shining brightly through the window and the mug still mostly filled in her hands, doing nothing to fight it. 

“Come on. It’s a work day! I’m sure everyone has got better things to do.” Ginny argues, the panic building in her chest. She needs to change this, fast. The peace of sitting in her childhood home that was remarkably strong moments ago, now, nothing but a distant memory. She’s not prepared to see Harry yet; she hasn’t had time to come up with a plan, to figure out the right move to make.

“We’ve all missed you, Ginny,” her Dad interjects, stopping the coming argument with the one blow that there’s no fighting back against. After that there's nothing she could say or do to stop it from happening . Or at least, nothing she’s willing to do.

From her position at the stove, Mrs. Weasley attempts to hide her satisfied grin, but Ginny can still see it.  
“Oh, stop pouting dear, it’s going to be fun. I’m making all your favourites.”

Ginny does her best to smile gratefully at her Mum, but her mind is racing. The week she thought she had to carefully analyze the pros and cons of informing Harry of their history, vanishing before her eyes.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
The few hours that she has until people start arriving only reiterate to her that there is no easy solution. Directly telling him could lead to problems, especially if a memory charm is involved, but so could not telling him only for him to suddenly remember her months from now. The reality is that she needs more information. So, as family members start to fill the Burrow, that’s the direction she decides to take.

It’s only once Bill walks in the backdoor, a sleepy Dominique in his arms, that Ginny remembers that she has an entirely different problem, one she’d forgotten to consider. Bill and his inquisitive gaze. 

Nevertheless, quick reactions and enthusiastic family members, who she’s never been more thankful to have, allow her to slip away undetected. She knows that it’s only a temporary solution, but for now she uses the sheer number of people in her family to her advantage, weaving in and around them whenever Bill gets too close to her with that determined look on his face. 

She’s so busy dodging Bill and making small talk with various people, for once trying to be a gracious host that nearly misses Harry arriving along with Ron, both of them probably coming together straight from work.

Taking a calming deep breath, Ginny squares her shoulders, watching her family members greet them. Time to get some answers.  
She waits for the ruckus of the new arrivals to die down and then casually looks for a place to position herself within hearing distance of Harry. She finds Audrey sitting alone a few seats away and moves in. The conversation is not preplanned, but after so long it’s easy for her to lead people into asking the questions she wants them to ask.

“So did you see anything interesting on your travels?” Audrey asks politely after a few minutes. 

Bingo. Ginny watches Harry carefully out of the corner of her eye as she recounts a totally fabricated thrilling adventure seeing the sights of Rome to see if the location triggers any memories. By the time she’s finished her tale, with her safe and sound back in her boarding house, of course, she’s given up hope of it working. There’s nothing at all about his posture or demeanour to indicate that anything has changed. Nothing.

She takes a few minutes to regroup, checking on her Mum still cooking despite the preparations from the morning, and then looks to implement step two. She spots Fleur sitting at the table quietly while Ron and Harry linger in the doorway between the kitchen and living room.

It’s always easy to pay the French woman a compliment. Sometimes, Ginny thinks she expects people to fawn over her. Not in a bad way, just that she embraces her beauty and doesn’t feel the need to diminish it for the sake of other people. Either way, compliments are expected so when Ginny sits down beside her sister-in-law, brushing her fingers lightly across the silvery blond hair in admiration, no one bats an eye. From there, it’s simple to casually mention that she had hair a similar colour for a while a few years back.

Before she is able to look over sneakily to see if that bit of information did anything, her Mum seems to register her words.

“You dyed your hair!”

As she listens to her Mum berate her for something she did over four years ago, she chances a glance towards Harry, but there’s still nothing. 

_Well, what to do now,_ she thinks frustratedly, that was the entirety of her hastily made plan.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
She tries not to let her lack of success get her down, but the reality is that she isn’t used to failing, at least not anymore and it has put her in a rotten mood which only worsens when her Mum calls them all to the table. For a while, she is able to just sit there silently eating her food, but it doesn’t last nearly long enough.

“So Ginny,” Audrey starts probably trying to be kind and include her in the conversation, a lesson that everyone else learned was fruitless years ago, “did you meet anyone interesting during your travels?”

Before she has time formulated a response that doesn’t just sound sarcastic and snarky, Angelina adds on “how about any interesting guys?” with a suggestive eyebrow wiggle.

Even though she knows she shouldn’t, she casts a quick glance over Harry, sitting just a few places down from her. If there was ever going to be a moment for him to remember, it would be now. As if he could feel her gaze, Harry looks up from his plate.

For one brief second as their eyes connect, she thinks maybe, maybe he’ll finally remember her. She’s not sure when this became so important to her, but sometime over the last 24 hours it has. Or maybe it mattered long before she saw him again and she doesn’t want to admit it; she needs him to remember, needs the time that they spend together to be real.

But there’s nothing. He gives her a somewhat sympathetic shrug and then refocuses on his food.

It’s only then that she realizes everyone is still waiting for her to answer. Willing her emotions to remain in check, she casually stabs a potato with her fork and then says, “No, no one that lasted long anyways.”

“More like no one could tolerate you for long,” Ron snickers from across the table, ever the jokester. She kicks him in retaliation, reminding herself that she doesn’t actually want to hurt him.

“See! Violent, this one,” he remarks with a wince, reaching down to rub at his limb. 

“I’ll show you violent,” she threatens. “I assure you, my bat bogey has only gotten stronger in the last couple of years.”

“Now, now…” she hears her Mum start to intervene, but her attention is shifted elsewhere, towards the small gasp a few seats away, so quiet that she only heard it because she was listening.

She turns back to Harry, Ron completely forgotten for the moment. This time when their eyes meet, she sees everything that she originally thought she’d see, confusion, regret, longing, hope, but then he looks away without saying a word and Ginny is left with just as many questions as before. 

_Really out of everything, that’s what he remembers?_   


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
_It’s not until the next day, after a late breakfast of random items from his cupboards, that Ginny starts to consider revealing herself as part of the magical community. At first it just seemed like common sense to keep that part of herself a secret, but with each passing hour as she talks with him, it feels more like a lie. There’s something about him that makes her feel like she can trust him. For all that she doesn’t say and that she knows he doesn’t say, there’s a kinship between them._

_Plus, she’s having fun, more fun than she’s had in a long time. Somehow, his presence is able to chase away her ghosts in a way that not even the most thrilling fight or strongest alcohol has been able to. She wouldn’t be opposed to lingering here for a while, if he is interested, but for that to work she definitely has to tell him. While she’s comfortable in the Muggle world, not being able to use her wand freely isn’t a reality she wants to go back to._

_Still, she’s not sure that she should. At this point, telling him could equal staying and she’s not sure she should, even if she might want to._

_In the end, the choice is taken out of her hand when a snitch unexpectedly comes flying out of a drawer she randomly opens while examining his place, just as he steps out of the shower. With the little golden ball whizzing around the small space, both of them staring at it with wide eyes, she decides to make the most of it; a wickedly brilliant idea forming in her head. After nearly 12 hours, Ginny still doesn’t know much about her host, but she has learned that it’s incredibly fun to mess with him._

_With that in mind. she turns to him on her best frightened and confused Muggle voice.“James!” she calls out in what can only be described as a squeak._

_He moves towards her slowly, eyes wary, still saying nothing and she just points to the snitch still buzzing around the room with a shaky finger. “How’s it moving?”_

_“Errr…” he starts and then trails off. “I don’t know… Magic?”_

_It takes everything within her not to laugh and blow her cover. Instead she opens her eyes wider and then in a timid voice asks, “magic?”_

_“It’s alright,” he tells her in a calm and gentle voice, letting out a deep sigh, “everything will be fine in just a minute.”_

_He moves faster than Ginny ever expected, pulling his wand out from behind him and starting the complicated spell movement to obliviate her._

_The second she sees his wand, she’s just as quick to react, triggering the release of her own wand and basting off the first hex that comes to her mind. For a second, Harry watches her wand in front of him frozen, his eyes a burning fire of fear and anger, and then he’s blasted back, landing on the ground with a loud thump._

_For a moment, she considers just leaving, running out the door, maybe out of the country, as fast as she can. He’ll be fine, the effects of the spell are completely temporary; the longest she’s ever seen it go one was an hour, but that’s exceedingly rare. Still, she hesitates, not ready to lose what she’s found with him so easily.The last day is the most comfortable she’s felt around someone, even herself, in a long, long time._

_“Did you just bat bogey me?” he asks incredulously, interrupting her internal debate._

_Still, somewhat conflicted, Ginny walks over to him and then crouches down beside him to inspect the damage. She brings her hand up to his cheek, turning his face and is thankful to see the flash of anger from before completely gone. She may not know him well, but for some reason she’s sure that there’s more amusement behind his question than actual frustration._

_“You were going to obliviate me!” she retorts, matching his playful tone._

_“Which is a completely rational thing to do when you think you’ve just broken the Statue of Secrecy and you have a, by all appearances, Muggle girl freaking out in your kitchen.” Any attempt he’s making to appear stern and serious, is ruined by the grin that threatens to light up his face whenever another snot bat flies out._

_“Why on earth would you ever subject a poor bloke to this?”_

_Ginny can’t help but wince as a particularly large bat exits his nose, perfectly emphasizing his point. “You could say it’s my signature spell…”_

_His eyes widen comically as he looks her up and down with a new perspective, but for once she doesn’t mind the appraisal._

_“Blimey, what have I gotten myself into?”_

_She shoves him back on to the ground good naturedly where he proceeds to lose his battle with laughing. It’s impossible not to join in and soon they’re both laying on the ground laughing like maniacs, bat boogies joining the Snitch flying above them. It feels good, laughing; she doesn’t laugh very often anymore._   
_“Come on, you must have a signature move too?” she asks after a while wiping the tears from her eyes._

_His laughter dies away, almost instantly, at her question and when she looks over at him, his eyes are once again dark and stormy. Before she can say anything however, the clouds disappear like they were never there in the first place._

_“Not that I can think of,” he finally answers and then with a teasing grin, “we can’t all be special like you.”_

_Later, over takeout, she considers how odd the shift was, how he almost seemed like an actor falling out of character for a moment, but then he says something witty, pulling her in for a kiss and she forgets about the second of strangeness._   


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
With the memory of his strange behaviour all those years ago fresh in her, Ginny spends the rest of the meal desperately trying to find a way to disappear, preferably with Harry in tow, without causing suspicion, but that’s never an option. It’s not until after the meal is finished and the dishes are cleared away, that Ginny gets the chance to escape the chaos, quietly slipping past everyone and out the backdoor.

“Where are you going?”

Ginny nearly jumps at the unexpected intrusion. reaching for her wand instinctively before the familiarity of the voice registers. “Bloody hell Bill, I almost hexed you. Why are you standing out here in the dark?”

_Damn it, why does he have to be so nosy_ she laments. She needs time to think, she needs to reevaluate the situation and most of all she needs to talk to Harry alone, none of which are going to happen with his presence looming over her wherever she goes.

“I can’t do this right now,” she informs him bluntly, not waiting for an answer; she doesn’t need one. 

“Can’t or won’t,” he asks, an unmoving statue.

She crosses her arms to match his defensive position, “won’t.”

For a minute, he stares her down, perhaps hoping that his stern glare will somehow convince her to give in, but as the seconds drag on and her resolve stays firm, he eventually lets his shoulders drop.

“At some point you’re going to have to,” he tells her with a sigh. “I let this go last time, convinced myself that you’d find your way back on your own, and that was a mistake I will regret for the rest of my life.”

“It’s not the same as last time,” she reassures him walking past him with a gentle pat to his broad arm. “I promise.”  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
It takes him a little longer than she’d like, but eventually Harry does show up.

“I always knew that you were really a redhead,” he says, approaching her with his hands in his pockets.

She stands up at his voice, a reluctant smirk on her face. “And yet, you couldn’t even recognize me as one.”

He winces knowing how bad it looks. If she were merciful, she’d leave it at that, but she’s not. Instead she teases, “way to make a witch feel memorable.”

She can’t help grinning a little wickedly as he shuffles back and forth uncomfortably. She'd honestly forgotten how much fun it was to mess with him.

It only takes him a moment after spotting her glee to recognize the teasing nature of her initial comment. He lets out an over dramatic sigh,placing his hand on his chest “how will you ever be able to forgive me?”

His sarcasm hits her at full force and her smile grows more genuine. He was always good at giving it back to her as good as she gave it.  
Instead of answering, she just raises an eyebrow, leans back against the tree behind her, crosses her arms and watches him, waiting expectantly.

“To be fair, I realized who you were very quickly after actually interacting with you. You could say I placed more value on your mind than your appearance.”  
She lets out a huff of laughter, _yeah of course, that’s definitely it_. He smiles back at her and for a moment they’re just staring at each other with goofy grins on their faces, a pleasant breeze ruffling the leaves of the trees and filling the air with the smell of fall.

But then his smile turns into a sort of grimace and the magic of the moment is lost. For a while it was easy to believe that they were nothing more than two old friends reuniting, but that’s not the case and they can only pretend that it is for so long.

“You can’t say anything,” he says suddenly, seriously.

“Why not?” she demands following his emotional change easily. Being told what she can and can’t do has never sat well with her.  
“I’m a different person now—”

She cuts him off, “me too.”

“A better person,” he continues on ignoring her interruption.

It’s impossible for her to stop the aggressive eye roll from taking place at his confession. He was the literal saviour of the wizarding world, vanquisher of the Dark Lord, long before he met her. She doesn’t think you can get much _better_ than that.

“Don’t,” he says crossly undoubtedly picking up on her exasperation, “you don’t know what I was like back then and if you thought about it for even a second you’d probably understand.”

“What the hell is _that_ supposed to mean?” Ginny asks, only resisting the urge to raise her voice in fear that their conversation will carry back to the house and the people inside.

“Why the bloody hell do you think it is that I can’t remember you?”

She can see the change, can feel the shift in his magic as it fills the air between them. He’s angry now, furious in a way that she thinks few people have ever seen. She should walk away, deescalate the situation, but even after all these years there’s something that comes alive inside at the prospect of a fight.

“I thought we already went through this, because you’re a self absorbed asshole?” she asks the question redundantly, voice scathingly cold.

“Why do you have to be so difficult?” he asks, frustratedly running his hand through his hair and then moving a few paces away from her.  
She hasn’t quite got her rage fuelled retort past her lips before he’s storming back over to her.

“I cannot remember most of that year,” he reveals, his voice deep and desperate, “I was so fucked from memory charms that there are spaces of time that are completely blank.” 

His breathing is rough, his body, his magic, agitated as he waits for her response, but she ignores all of that in favour of all the new questions swirling around in her head. So she was right, it was a memory charm but how can he remember her now then? Is his magic just powerful enough to break through them? Her mind races trying to figure out the answers, but every second there’s another question. Who would do that to him? And why?

Spurred on by her continued silence, misunderstanding the cause, Harry continues, the confession flowing out of him in a frantic ramble. “I couldn’t live with the memories inside my head, the ghosts of the people I lost. So one day, after I saw someone obliviate a Muggle who had accidentally witnessed some magic, I got to thinking. If they could just forget what they saw why couldn’t the same thing work for me?”

It takes her a second to comprehend his words and the horror sets in. Nobody did this to him, he did it to himself.  
Over the years she's gone to some pretty dark places herself, thought about doing some things that you can’t just come back from, but the idea of losing her memories, of actually, purposely taking them away, had never once crossed her mind. Her memories are her greatest strength. They are what she relies on in difficult situations. Experience and instinct, that’s what had got her through a lot of life.

He seems to deflate in front of her. “These people, your family, they mean the world to me. If they knew...” he looks broken, the version of the man she only saw glimpses of during their time together.

“They’d understand,” she tells him genuinely, finally understanding what happened all those years ago a little better.  
But that compassion doesn’t last long.

Within a blink of an eye his demeanour changes, gone is the vulnerability, replaced by a self righteous anger. “Oh yeah I’m sure. And that’s why you’ve told them all about your time with the Adrestia order, right? Because you _know_ that they’d understand.”

Her eyes widen at his insinuation, her mouth gaps as she tries to form words though the shock and panic filling her. _How could he possibly know about that?_ “How the hell can you know about that?”

He just shrugs arrogantly like it’s a casual piece of information he just dropped not knowledge about a secret society that he has no business knowing about. There’s a dark glint to his eyes when he reveals, “You have their mark on you.”

She can almost feel the small tattoo burning on the back of her left hip as another level of indignation and anger rising up within her. “And what you just decided to say nothing!”

“Like you wouldn’t have run the minute I broached the subject.”

“No,” she lets out a humorous laugh “that’s what you did, remember?”

“Is it really considered running when you’re trying to escape an explosion?” he asks, moving another step closer to her.

“Oh and let me guess, I’m the explosion,” Ginny remarks heatedly, mirroring his movements so that they are nearly nose to nose, almost all rational gone.

“Hey, you said it, not me.”

She wants to scream. She wants to curse him. She wants to run. Damn it. Damn him.

“Fuck you!” she yells as loudly as she dares breaking free from his space.

“I’m pretty sure you already did that.” he calls as she walks farther into the trees, farther away from him.

It’s only once she’s sure that he isn’t going to follow her looking for round two that she lets herself collapse, her breath leaving her all at once. She pulls her knees up to her chest trying to calm her racing heart. It’s fine, she tells herself over and over again. He’s not going to say anything, not when it’s his secret on the line too.

If it was anything else, literally anything else, she’d say screw it and tell her family all about their history, never mind the fact that she didn’t want them to know in the first place, just to piss him off.

But what he knows is not just anything, it’s everything. The reason why she left and the reason why she came back.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s only once she’s sure she has regained control of her emotions that Ginny finally pushes herself off of the cold ground and starts making her way towards the house. The old trees and sounds of animals coming out for the night keep her company as she follows the familiar path until finally the shape of the Burrow comes into view. In her haste to get away from h— in her haste to get away, she walked much further into the woods that she originally thought.

She pulls her jumper sleeves further down her arms hoping to contain the last vestiges of warmth in her fingers. She could pull out her wand and cast a warming charm, it would probably be the smart thing to do, but right now the only thing keeping her somewhat grounded is the cold bite of the wind against her face. The thought of losing that security has her frozen a few feet from the back door, unable to make the final few steps into the warm kitchen.

_Thank Merlin Bill isn’t still out here waiting._ The thought finds its way to the front of her mind through the storm. She’s not sure she’d be able to stand up to another interrogation from him right now. She wonders idly whether she’ll find him still in the house or if he’ll have gotten tired of waiting for her to return and just left.

Either way, she doesn’t want to go in there, in fact, she physically can’t go in there and the thought pisses her off. She’s not a coward, she doesn’t run from a fight, she’s a bloody Gryffindor. It’s another item to add to the list of reasons to hate _him._ Somehow, within a matter of minutes he has reduced her to that person, the one who runs, and she’s not that. She promised herself that she wouldn’t be.

It’s nearly laughable, the power that he still manages to have over her. Right now, even the thought of him has her knees weak and her hands shaky. She hates him, hates him with every fibre of her being. She knows it’s illogical, she’s been in far worse situations, had far more sinister people enter her life, but she lets the anger fuel her.

For once in her miserable life, she didn’t actually do anything wrong. It’s all on him. With that in mind, she pushes herself forward into the house, the backdoor swinging open much more dramatically than she expected.

But it doesn’t matter; there’s no one to notice. The room is empty, deserted, the lamp lights dimmed and the clutter cleared away. As quickly as it came, she feels the bust of energy deflate. She’s all alone. That simple fact should seem like a blessing, she really doesn’t want to interact with people right now, but instead it feels incredibly lonely. 

Standing there alone in her childhood kitchen, which was filled to the brim with people mere hours ago, she can’t help but feel more lonely than she did in all of her years away. Well, with the exception of the morning she woke with nothing, but empty space beside her in bed and a hastily scribbled note, but she pushes those memories away with a firm shake of her head.

A shiver passes through her, the air chilled around her, but now it’s not comforting in the slightest.

She finds her parents in the living room talking softly to one another over the rhythmic clicking of her mother’s knitting nettles, the radio in the background and a warm fire flickering brightly between them. Her Mum perks up when she sees Ginny standing in the doorway. 

“Oh there you are! Everyone had to leave, it was getting late.”

There’s clear disapproval in her voice, whether for not being around to say goodbye to everyone or for being out so long without a word, but either way she can’t bring herself to be annoyed at the silent reprimand. She’s used up all her fire for tonight.

“Sorry, lost track of time,” she apologizes on autopilot. 

Something about her exhaustion must reflect in her answer because her Mum’s eyes notably soften, “you must be cold, I could heat up some tea?”

She’s already shaking her head no before her Mum’s got the offer entirely out. “No thanks, I’m just going to head up to bed.”

“You could come--” she starts to offer, but her Dad places a hand softly on her Mum’s arm silencing her. 

“Goodnight dear,” he says. 

“Goodnight,” her Mum echoes.

She mumbles a quiet night as she passes them on her way up the stairs, already lost in a world of thought, memories of the past and present clashing together to create a living nightmare.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
The next few days pass in a blur. She spends most of her time hanging around the house, reacquainting herself with the place she used to know so well. She attempts to bake with her Mum, listens to her Dad describe his latest Muggle discovery and then, when her parents start to question her lingering presence, she goes to visit Fred and George at the joke shop, admiring their products and listening to their jokes.

She gets an offer to go visit with her sister-in law and niece from Percy, which she takes thankfully the next day. She also gets a frenzied owl from Ron with an invitation to come see the team play, but that she pushes aside without a second glance. Bill, for his credit, doesn’t even bother trying to get her to visit. She should be thankful that he’s decided to back off for a minute, but instead she just feels restless, a sort of tense anticipation humming under her skin at all times despite her overall numbness. 

Altogether, it's a fairly busy few days, not that she feels present for most of it. She walks around in a daze, locked within an internal battle unsure of what she’s doing or where she’s meant to be going. It’s all very contradictory and leaves her feeling disjointed, like the land beneath her feet could fall way with any moment.

Despite the fact that she does her absolute best to keep _him_ far from her mind, he continues to invade her thoughts. Quick flashes of anger when she’s surrounded by laughing customers, a bout of confusion as she watches the children in the park play, a wave of sadness lying in bed late at night. If she’s honest, a lot of her distress is coming from him and their lack of resolution.

She doesn’t know what to do, about him specifically, but also everything else that he represents and it's an unfamiliar feeling, or at least a long forgotten one. It’s been a long time since her life has been this. Nowadays, she thinks, she rationalizes and then she acts. For the most part, she’s always known what needs to be done even if, in the moment, she is unwilling or unable to do it. The last time everything felt this unstable, she was only 14 trying to figure out her place in a rapidly changing world.

_Sitting at the Gryffindor table watching the owls swoop down carrying papers filled with new decrees and ordinances, Ginny has to fight off the urge to cause a scene. For a long time, she thought that nothing could be as bad as her first year, but this is infinitely worse._

_The diary was bad, worse than bad, it was a despicable piece of magic that will leave scars on her for the rest of her life, but there was nothing she could have done to prevent everything from happening, nothing more she could have done to stop it sooner. Back then she was inexperienced and naïve. Now though, she knows better, knows how to read the signs of incoming disaster and still there’s nothing she can do to stop it._

_She just has to sit back and watch as the world falls apart; watch as Tom once again rises to power while the Ministry scrabbles to establish control in a way that she can’t help but feel is entirely pointless and the Order of the Phoenix, which she’s not really supposed to know about, is just barely starting to regroup. For all that they say they are accomplishing, she doesn’t see either of them doing much of anything to quell the coming storm._

_With every day, her frustration continues to mount and no one understands. They all just keep telling her that everything will be fine, to keep her nose down and her head clear, but the reality is that Ginny’s never been the kind of girl who can just sit back and do nothing, even if that’s what people have always asked of her._

_Her parents don’t want to get involved, not with as many kids on the line as they have. Not that she blames them, not really. It’s a risk, what’s happening to Dumbledore is really the only example needed, but they are supposed to be better than this; they are supposed to understand that sitting back in silence comes with a cost too._

_They don’t seem to though, none of them. They don’t understand her need to do something either, but maybe that’s not their fault either. Years later and they still don’t know about the diary, about Tom or the things he made her do. To them, she’s still the same girl that boarded the train her first year and the reality is that she hasn’t been that girl in a long time._

_Out of everyone, Bill might be the only one who comes close to understanding how she feels, even if he doesn’t actually know anymore than the rest of them. He’s involved in something, she knows it, even if he’s still refusing to discuss it with her._

_For now, she lets the fact there are people out there, like Bill, doing what they can, comfort her. It’s not enough to satisfy her by any means, but it’s something. That something, however, only lasts until the start of December, when her frustration finally boils over. Fear for her loved ones and hope in other people, no longer enough to satisfy her._

_Walking into her Tuesday Defense class, Ginny hears the now expected groans telling her that she’ll find neat rows of desks and a reading assignment on the chalkboard, long before she actually enters the room. Nevertheless, a sharp tut, tut, from Unbridge silences those complaints quickly._

_She’s only a few pages in, copying notes like the diligent student she’s attempting to be, when something inside her snaps. There’s no warning signs, no obvious trigger, one second she’s playing her part perfectly and the next she’s physically incapable of not saying something._

_“Are we ever going to get the chance to actually practice any of these spells?” she asks, her voice loud and clear across the quiet classroom._

_She keeps her eyes locked on Umbridge sitting primly at the front desk as she waits for an answer, refusing to back down._

_“As soon as you have mastered the theory, then we will progress—” Umbridge informs her, voice sickly sweet._

_“I think I’m good with the theory,” she responds, doing her absolute best to convey calm certainly despite the sweat dripping down her back. “I’d like to actually learn something useful now. To practice these spells before--”_

_If she didn’t know she was playing with fire before, it’s obvious from the way that Umbridge’s eyes twitch as she makes her way towards her. Still, she’s powerless to stop it. And really, she’s not sure she would even if she could. It’s well past time she stopped being silent, stopped pretending that everything is fine when it most certainly isn’t._   
_“Before what, Mrs. Weasley?” she responds cooly, “why would school children ever_ need _to practice defensive magic?”_

_There’s an unmistakable threat behind her question now, daring her to make a claim that’s sure to send her down a dangerous path. She can feel the tension around her build as her classmates wait with baited breath believing that she’s about to make the same claim. But that’s kind of beside the point as far as Ginny is concerned. Danger can come from anywhere, a Dark Lord doesn’t need to have risen for Defense to be necessary. Sometimes, something as simple as a diary can be dangerous._

_“Why wouldn’t we?” she asks back, daring her._

_“Detention!” Umbridge screams, finally losing the mask, “get out of my classroom!”_

_“Gladly!” she responds, shoving her books into her bag and then storming out._

_“Get back to work!” she hears her yell as she quickly makes her way as far from the classroom as possible._

_It’s only once she’s safely hidden in between stacks of books that she lets the full impact of what she just did hits her. In all likelihood, she’ll regret her actions eventually, especially after she gets a letter from home, but for now, she lets the empowerment of the moment wash over her. Despite the anxiety racing through her, she feels better than she has in months, like a great burden of weight has been lifted._

_She goes to detention on Saturday and then the Saturday after that. Her friends, or rather her roommates, act like it’s all a joke, the patent Weasley anger rearing its ugly head, but then again, they don’t seem to see anything wrong with what’s happening in the first place. She doesn’t show anyone the scars now marking her arm and she’s not close enough to anyone for them to be noticed, but the words ‘I will remember my place’ staring back at her whenever she looks down, serve as a consistent motivator rather than a deterrent._

_She receives an owl from her parents asking her, begging her, not to make herself a target and she resolves to keep a better hold on her emotions. Now though, instead of hiding she’s waiting; waiting for the right person to come along and mould the raging storm of resentment and anger lingering under the surface into an effective tool._   


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
It’s with a grateful sigh that Ginny Apperates away from the Burrow first thing in the morning a few days after her encounter with Harry, ready for her first day of work and a distraction from her near constant worrying. There’s something calming about having one specific task ahead even if that one task is unnerving.

Landing with a soft pop, she surveys the forest around her. A cold wind shakes the nearly bare trees, creating a soft ruffle in an otherwise unearthly silence. She didn’t expect the temperature to be that dramatically different only a few hours north, but then again, she doesn’t really believe that the location of this place has anything to do with the chill in the air.

Dark magic happened here and the land still remembers. 

With a small shutter, she presses forward, refusing to let the feeling deter her. After all, she knew what she was walking into long before she left her home this morning or took this assignment a week ago.

She feels a faint tingle across the back of her neck, just the smallest twinge of something, as she exits the trees, passing through the line that marks the edge of the property. 

There are no actual wards up, she knows, those would have been taken down years ago when the Blishwick brothers were arrested and the Aurors searched the premises, but with old places like this there is no way to ever truly remove all magic.

The estate looks exactly like she thought it would look after all these years, standing starkly against the early morning light. Although it was never the largest of homes, it was grand in its own way. Now through, the place just looks old and decrepit with weeds littering the grass and growing up the walls. A few floors up there’s a broken window that no one has bothered to fix despite how easy it would be to repair it. The structure looks like it’s stood abandoned for centuries rather than years, but that’s not really that surprising, dark magic and all will do that to a place. 

She pushes the disturbing thoughts out of her mind, she has a job to do here and she’ll be damned if she lets the past distract her from it. She knows for her brief message that the passage that she’s going to be working on is underground, but that doesn’t mean there aren't any clues to be found from looking elsewhere. Experience has taught her that.

It was easy to fall into curse breaking once she decided to try and piece her life back together. The concept of taking a problem and searching until you could find an answer was familiar to her. It’s basically what she spent her later Hogwarts years doing. She definitely didn’t take the right classes or have the proper requirements, but when you’re as good at your job as she is, people tend to let it slide. Especially when you have the same last name as one of the best curse breakers and are willing to take risks that most people aren’t. 

Taking jobs that most sane people would avoid is how she made a name for herself. Two years of that, of proving herself and her skills, means that now she’s basically free to take any job she wants. 

With one final look around, Ginny heads to the entrance way where she was told that someone would be waiting for her.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
“We’ve hired someone to work with you,” the man tells her as they pass through the main portion of the house getting straight to it.

He wasn't what she was expecting to find when she walked up to the front entrance, with his pale face and twitchy disposition, he didn’t seem suited to a life of curse breaking in the slightest. Standing in the broken down house, it seems even more apparent, but she lets the thought pass unexamined when his words registure. 

“I work alone,” she tells him firmly as they begin descending the stairs. “It’s better that way, safer. I can’t have some inexperienced curse breaker poking around while I’m trying to unravel old and complex’s charms—”

He cuts her off abruptly, “he not another curse breaker—”

“Send him home,” she demands, passing him and walking into the section where the tunnel starts, “I’ll sign whatever wavers you want, but I will not have some inexperienced fool running around ruining things!”

“I’m sorry, but he really was quite insistent and honestly, I doubt he will be any trouble. Actually it’s quite possible that he’ll be of assistance…” the man rambles on, but Ginny tunes him out, trying instead to control her mounting frustration.

She’s looking around the small space, trying to create a plan when a groan from across the narrow pathway breaks through her companions mindless chatter. She looks up only to see Harry’s distinctive figure silhouetted in the light coming from the main part of the house.

“Of course,” she hears him groan. 

Her lips purse together in a look that’s not all that dissimilar to her mother. _Of course._  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
The minute that they are left alone, her guide mumbling his goodbyes and then making a hasty exit with a quick glance between them, the tension in the small space seems to triple. A feat which she didn’t actually think was possible.

Another second of tension filling the air and she’s decided that the best way to go about this will be to ignore his presence. He doesn’t matter, not to her and not to this project. With a rigid stance, she turns away from him and starts working on the preliminary charms, ones to protect her and warn her if anything is going wrong.

She can hear him shuffling further into the passageway and then dropping something on the ground behind her, but she keeps her eyes focused on the invisible spells in front of her.

He lets out a huff.

_Don’t react_ , she tells herself forcefully.

He lets out a groan.

“Do you have something you’d like to say?” she asks heatedly, spinning around to face him so fast that her red hair flies like a whip behind her.

He raises his hands at her as if she’s some crazed animal that might strike him down without a second thought, watching her with that stupid grin on his face. “Wow, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”

For a second, she just stands there staring at him blankly; he’s teasing her, being flirty as if their last interaction didn’t happen. She narrows her eyes at him and the grin falls away.

“Okay, that’s how it’s going to be then,” he says voice cold as stone. “Where do you want me?”

If his question causes some very different scenarios to through her mind briefly, well she’s never going to admit it. “Over there and quiet.”

His eyes flash, but he moves over to the side where she directed, a small divot in the stone wall about as far away from where she needs to work as she can possibly get him. She watches him for a moment, standing there with his arms crossed leaning against the wall, just to make sure that he’s going to stay put and then turns back to her work.

She has every intention of resuming her spells immediately, but there’s something about this man that just makes her reckless. “You could just leave…” she calls out with her back still facing him.

“Not a chance.”

It’s impossible to tell whether that declaration fills her with hope or dread.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
The work is slow and tedious, but they make good time, moving farther down the mysterious tunnel at a steady rate. Occasionally, she’ll hear Harry shuffling along behind her or muttering to himself, but she doesn’t let him or the tension that lingers in the air, distract her again. She has a job to do.

“This is ridiculous,” Harry busts out suddenly, perhaps realizing that subtlety wasn’t going to get him anywhere. “Are you just going to ignore me?”

She continues to do just that, grinding her teeth together in an effort to keep her mouth shut.

“You’re acting like a child,” he tells her. 

He’s trying to get a reaction out of her, she knows it, but still she can’t seem to contain the hysterical laughter from escaping. “Oh _I’m_ the child?” she asks bitterly, “keep my secrets or I’ll out yours? Really nice Potter, classy.”

For a second, it seems like they are about to pick up where they left off. She can feel the tingle of uncontrolled magic in the air as they eye each other, waiting to see who’s going to make the first move. Until suddenly, she remembers her vow to herself, her promise to not let him get to her, to not let him have any power over her whether good or bad.

“Can we just not do this?” There’s way more desperation in her voice than she’d like, but there’s really nothing to be done about it.

He looks at her then, really looks at her, maybe for the first time since he figured out who she was and she lets him. She keeps her face impassive, if not a little bored, her body language relaxed with a tinge of exasperation. Let him see that she doesn’t care. People always say that there’s a thin line between love and hate, that where there’s one, there’s the possibility of the other, so let him see neither. Let him see indifference.

It makes her uncomfortable, so incredibly uncomfortable, and it’s harder than she thought it would be to project a believable version of herself to him, but she knows him or at least she thinks she does. He isn’t going to be able to let this go unless he’s sure there’s no hope; that there’s nothing to be done to change things.

It takes him a while, but eventually he offers a small nod in reluctant acceptance.

She turns back to her work without another word.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
Somehow they manage to make it through the rest of the day, working together silently and seamlessly, but heavy weight in the air remains. A weight that she only realizes is slowly suffocating her when they are back outside, the dusky sky open wide above them and the cool wind blowing across their faces. It’s impossible to know whether the tightness in her chest is the result of being surrounded by questionable magic for so long or simply from the continual tension of having Harry close, but either way she’s glad to be free.

“I guess that’s it for now…” he says breaking the silence between them for the first time in hours.

She should be annoyed that he’s back to talking to her, but she just can’t bring herself to care. It has been a long day, a long week if she thinks about it, and she’s tried. Coming back, doing this, was never going to be simple, but it’s been so much harder than she could have ever anticipated. 

With a small nod directed at him in agreeance and goodbye, she starts to walk towards the clearing she arrived in, eager to fall into bed and hopefully finally get some sleep.

She only makes it a few steps down the long driveway before his voice calling out for her to wait, makes her pause. She should just keep going, she knows it, but there’s something about him that always seems to make her reject her instincts. She hesitates a moment longer before turning around to face him.

They stand there watching each other in the dim light for what seems like an eternity. She feels the tightening in her chest again, but it’s different this time.   
She’s powerless to stop it. She doesn’t want to stop it. 

“I’m sorry,” he tells her after a beat, sitting down heavily on the front steps a few feet away from her.

“Don’t,” she says softly, so quiet she’s not sure he can even hear it. 

“I shouldn’t have reacted like that.”

_That right there_ , she thinks despondently, _is why staying, why letting him talk was a terrible idea._ It’s too easy with him. It was too easy then it’s too easy now. Already, she can feel her cold exterior melting, falling away with one simple apology. And it’s not even about the fight anymore, not really. 

It was a rotten reaction, he shouldn’t have lashed out, but she understands why he did. The problem is that somehow, he always manages to break through her defenses, manages to leave her weak and vulnerable and that’s not an acceptable place to be right now. It might never be an acceptable place to be. 

“No shit,” she retorts sharply, crossing her arms. She tries desperately to regain her footing as he watches her, to reinforce the walls around her mind; inside her heart. She won’t go down this path again with him, she can’t.

He runs his head through his hair in exasperation even as a fond smile graces his lips, “you really can’t make things easy can you?”

She lets out a sigh and moves to sit beside him. The truth is she doesn’t want to fight with him, it’s exhausting and it doesn’t seem to be getting her anywhere. But the alternative, letting him in and seeing what happens, is also unacceptable. What she’s left with is no good options.

“Okay,” she says after a moment, landing on a decision.

“Okay?” he questions, looking at her warily.

She takes a deep breath, “We’re good.”

He looks surprised and honestly, she is too. Playing the line like this, trying to carefully walk the balance between appearing present and staying detached, it’s risky, it might not work, it could all blow up in her face, but for now it’s all she’s got.


	5. Chapter 5

“Why’d you take this job?” Harry asks her suddenly, a few hours into working the next day. 

It’s the first real attempt he has made at expanding the fragile peace between them into an easy comradeship and she doesn’t know what to make of it. While they said good morning to each other and she hasn’t been actively ignoring him, she also hasn’t been chatty. The reality is that she doesn’t want to be chatty. In fact, talking to him in a friendly matter at all seems counterproductive to her goal of remaining detached, but she chose her path already and there’s no backtracking now. 

Still, Ginny ignores him for a moment. Partly because she’s determined to finish this last bit of spell work before she stops, but also because she needs a minute to gather her thoughts. The question shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to her, for all intents and purposes it’s a very safe question for him to be asking, an easy way for him to break the awkwardness lingering between them, but it does. She’s not sure how to answer; how much of her truth to give away.

“Hello?” he complains at her continued silence, but there’s no actual annoyance on his face when she turns to glance at him quickly. 

With a final swish and a satisfied nod, Ginny steps away from the invisible barrier. She makes her way over to him reaching down to grab an apple from their pack and then taking a seat beside him. Not too close, but not too far either. 

“I like a challenge,” Ginny tells him, fiddling with the fruit in her hands. It’s an easy answer, the one that everyone expects her to give. And it’s the truth, at this point she’s made enough of a name for herself that she only takes jobs that interest her, it’s just not the whole truth. 

Harry hums his agreement like her answer makes perfect sense to him which she finds oddly disconcerting. He shouldn’t know her well enough to be making that kind of an assessment about her. 

“What about you?” she asks to draw the focus away from her, not liking the look in his eyes one bit. “You evidently don’t need the money.”

“I get bored,” he answers with a small shrug. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Quidditch, being paid to watch people play every day is quite possibly the dream job, but it’s not all that exciting. I’ve been with the team for almost three years now and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually gotten to pull my wand out.” 

“Really, there’s not a whole lot of threats against the Chuddly Cannons?” she says sarcastically. 

“Well, you mean beside the hoards fan girls right?” he responds quickly with a conspiratorial wink. 

A small huff of laughter manages to escape before she can stop it. He’s good, she’ll give him that. 

The rest of the day passes in a similar manner. Now that the tension between them is truly cleared from the air, she finds that they actually make a pretty good team, moving through the various obstacles much quicker than she had hoped. 

It was good, she reflects later that night, quietly walking up the stairs so as to not disturb her sleeping parents, they were good. She pushes that thought away quickly though. While she’s glad that they called a truce, and that it seems to be working, she can’t afford to let herself get swept up in him again. 

_Not that picking up where they left off is even something he’s interested in,_ she reminds herself sternly.

No it wouldn’t work, she’s a different person now and so is he.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
“You’re working at the Bishwick house!” Bill asks, bursting into her room the next morning without so much as a courtesy knock.

Even though she’s been up for hours, gone for a run, had breakfast with her parents and then returned to her room to read for a while, the fact that she could have been sleeping, could have been resting on her first day off after two long days of hard work, instantly sets her on edge. It could also be the unexpected nature of this visit, or rather intrusion. She’s been avoiding him, that’s no secret, but if they are finally going to have this confrontation, she would have much rather started it on her own terms. 

“Oh Bill, how nice to see you! I’m doing great, thank you very much. How are the girls? Work’s been busy lately, well that’s a shame,” she says sarcastically, the sickly sweet smile on her face in complete opposition to the raging fire in her eyes. 

“Cut the bullshit, Ginny,” he reprimands sharply, clearly in no mood to deal with her antics which, really, he should know better, just amps her up more. 

“How has work been for me, you ask?” she continues on smartly, “it’s been kind of slow, I just started up this new project…”

She watches in a sort of sick amusement as his jaw twitches and his fists clench at his sides, his desperate attempt to keep hold of his temper. “Ginny, I’m not asking again.”

She stands up from her position resting on the bed, doing her best not to roll her eyes at him; she may be smaller than him physically, but there’s absolutely no way that she’s about to let that intimidate her. That being said, she knows there’s a line with Bill and she’s right at the edge of it. 

“Well,” she says, interrupting his glaring with an annoyed flourish of her hand, “what do you want to know?” 

The reality is that she was never trying to hide her work there, and even if she was, it’s not worth the fight to her now. Not when she already has so many unresolved issues with him. 

“How did you even know about it?” he asks eventually, rubbing his hand across his face in exhaustion. 

“Did Potter tell you about it?” he follows up with acusion in his voice before she has a chance to respond. 

“Harry?” she asks confused, “what has he got to do with it?”

“Who do you think told him about it?” 

She just blinks at him for a moment, the question had honestly never crossed her mind. There have been so many bigger things to worry about, but now that the thought is there, it makes perfect sense. Still, it does make her question what else he may know about Harry.

He continues to glare at her expectantly, and she forces herself to focus on the present.“I don’t understand what’s the big deal, you knew I was Curse Breaking, you’ve known it for years, so why is it an issue all of a sudden?” 

“Why this job?” he asks or more likely demands.

“I don’t know!” she retorts, trying to dodge the question, “Why any job over another?” 

He’s clearly not impressed; she’s going to have to give him more than that if she wants him to let it go. “I saw it, it was here and by all accounts, it’s a pretty routine job…” she half asks playing the innocent like she used to be able to do so well. 

“I don’t know Ginny, is it?” There’s that knowing glint to his eye again that she doesn’t like at all. 

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be,” she says with an indifferent shrug that she doesn’t believe for a second that he buys . The question is whether he’s finally going to make good on his threat to not let things go anymore. 

He opens his mouth ready to take the plunge, but she doesn’t give him the chance. “You’re giving Harry job tips?” 

The discussion ends rather quickly after that, Bill not being in any mood to answer her questions about Harry after she, once again, refused to give him anything. He leaves her room with all the dramatics that he entered, less than an hour earlier before, slamming the door shut behind him in a way that has their Mum rebuking him on instinct. 

She waits until she hears the front door close, singling his exit, and then falls back on her bed in a huff. She spends the rest of the morning and into the afternoon there, filled with a, maybe unjustified, frustration. Of course, Bill wasn’t willing to share what he knew after her treatment of him, but he didn’t need to be so bloody smug about it.

It just seems like it’s one thing right after with Harry, she gets over the shock of seeing him again and then bam, he knows more about her past than she ever could have thought. Then she gets over that, only to find out there’s something more. It’s not that big of a deal, the fact that there’s maybe more to Harry’s connection to her family than she originally thought, but it leaves her feeling unsettled. Again. 

She lets a drawn out sigh escape; today was supposed to be a Harry free day. Just one day, one little day where she could relax and not have to think, or worry about everything that she knows and everything that she doesn’t. 

As if the universe is laughing at her, right as she starts to decompress and accept the fact that she can’t do anything about the Bill problem, or the recurring Harry problem for that matter, a series of loud voices drift up through her open window, disturbing her tranquility. 

Her brow pulls together in confusion. For a second, she continues to lie there trying to make sense of the distorted speech, but eventually, she gives it up as a lost cause. As she takes the few steps necessary to be able to see outside, she congratulates herself on not instantly thinking there was a threat when she heard the noise. It’s not much, and it seems a little ridiculous, but she’s proud of herself nonetheless. It’s progress, especially after the week she’s just had. 

Just as she expected, she spots a sizable group gathered in the field across from the house, in what is essentially the Burrows back garden. Three stories up and more than a dozen yards away, she's not able to make out faces even if she squints, but the patent Weasley red hair is more than recognizable. 

“Don’t you lot have jobs?” she yells, sticking her head out the window. 

She hears a chorus of laughter and some disjointed grumbling, but nothing clear enough to make out. 

“Come on down!” Eventually reaches her as someone, probably Percy, remembers that they’re wizards and amplifies his voice. 

She ducks her head back inside, an excited grin already forming on her face. She doesn’t know what exactly her brothers have got planned, but generally there’s never a dull moment when they’re all together. 

The irony of the timing only becomes apparent once she’s downstairs and standing in front of the group of people. Aside from Percy, Fred, George and Ron, there’s her two sisters in laws, a splattering of both Ron and the twin’s school friends, a few their work friends and then standing bright in the sunlight, Harry Potter himself. 

“Well, what do you say?” Ron says pulling her attention from where she’d been staring or more accurately glaring openly at Harry, “want to dust off that old broom and play with us? We need another Seeker.”

Before she even has the chance to wonder who the other Seeker could be Ron continues, “Harry’s pretty good, might even be faster than you. I’m sure he’d like to show off a bit. He’s normally stuck being a Chaser.” 

It’s him, of course it’s him. At this point, she should stop being surprised. 

Harry starts to interrupt, assuring her brother that he doesn’t mind his usual position, but she cuts him off. “Sounds great.” 

Ron grins at her and then shoves Harry’s shoulder in the friendly way that just seems to be a part of sports. “We’ve got ourselves a game!”

He moves over to the shed where all the equipment is stored, but she lingers. She doesn’t regret her hasty agreement for a second, seeing the joy across her brother's face would have been enough, but the thought of getting to play again after all these years is filling her with a giddy excitement. It’s a feeling that she thought she lost a long time ago, when dreams of being a famous Quidditch player fell wayside to learning new curses and practicing self-defence. 

Wrapped up in memories of the past, she doesn’t notice Harry staying back until he speaks. 

“I’m sorry,” he says with an apologetic shuffle, eyes darting over to where everyone else is currently haggling over positions and teams, “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“It’s my house,” she deadpans. Sometimes it’s really hard to believe that this man is responsible for saving the world as they know it. 

“Yeah… Ron invited me and I didn’t think to ask where this was happening… but even if I had, there’s no way that I could have convinced him that I was busy…”

There’s something about him, some odd combination of uncertain hesitancy and fierce determination that makes all of her anger disappear against her will. She kind of hates it. She kind of loves it. 

“Are you guys playing or what?” one of the twins yells across the field. 

Despite the obvious growing impatience of the group, Harry remains where he is waiting for her to make her decision, to decide whether it’s okay for him to stay or not. 

She gives him a small nod of approval which he returns with a hesitant smile before returning to the group. 

“I’m going to start to think that you’re obsessed with me,” she teases once his back is turned. 

“In your dreams,” he responds quickly, this time with an easy smile.

_Yeah that’s the problem,_ she thinks wryly as she follows him towards the makeshift pitch.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
“And go!” Percy yells, acting in his official capacity as referee.

In an instant, everyone is up in the air racing towards their end of the field to enact their pre-planned routines. For her part, Ginny sees a brief flash of gold and then the snitch is gone, lost into the background of the Burrow’s landscape. 

She ends up high in the sky, searching for the tiny golden ball with Harry trailing closely behind her. This far up it almost feels like they’re in their own little world, and surprisingly it isn’t uncomfortable. They are both competitive, fighting to get hold of the snitch with a ferocity that not a lot of people possess, but there’s a lightness to it all. She laughs more during that single game than she did in all the years since she last saw him. 

A daring dive that even she’s not crazy enough to contemplate, gets him the snitch and just like that, the game is over, the moment is lost. Back on the ground, surrounded by the moaning of her teammates and kind hearted jesting from her opponents, everything about it starts to like a problem. The weightlessness she felt on her broom replaced with a heavier weight than when she first took flight. 

“And you didn’t think I could handle a broom,” Harry remarks with a grin walking up to her after the crowd starts to disperse. With his broom perched on his shoulder, his hair wild from the wind and a radiant smile on his face, the difference between how he looked last time they were standing by these trees and now is remarkable. 

The joy surrounding him starts to deflate as he takes in her increasingly cold demeanour. In the back of her mind, she knows that she’s not being fair to him, that all this back and forth, hot and cold behaviour from her has got to be exhausting. It’s exhausting to her. She can’t seem to stay away, but she can’t seem to stay either. 

It’s not the right move, not by a long shot, but she turns away from him without a single word. 

Fortunately, the game lasted much longer than anyone anticipated and she is able to slip aways with few complaints. Not being the only one to baw out of the second game which George is insisting they play. She could transition over to chaser like she knows Harry is going to do, but she needs to get away and luckily no one questions her motives.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
By the time Ginny returns outside, having reaffirmed to herself that she can handle everything, the backyard is full of people taking advantage of the unseasonably warm temperatures. She spots her brother’s families, some people she doesn’t recognise, but of course, her eyes land on Harry, talking to an older woman that she also doesn’t know.

She pulls her eyes away with a firm shake of her head and then settles herself in helping her Mum dish out the mountain of food she has made. She meanders through the crowds, hanging with her brothers, catching up with people she hasn’t seen since before she left. As the evening progresses the lightness starts to return; it’s not as hard as she thought it would be to have all these people around. 

The ease even remains when Harry plops down on to the ground beside her, hours later when the sun has been replaced by the moon and little glowing balls of fire illuminate the world around them. 

He doesn’t say anything for a long while and she doesn’t either, not because she doesn’t want him around, but simply because she doesn’t quite know what to say to him after her reaction earlier. 

“Did I do something?” he eventually asks, hesitantly clear in his voice, “I mean… not like— I know before, but just now. Everything seemed fine and then it wasn’t.”

She turns her head to face him, resting her cheek on the palm of her hand. She wishes she had some simple answer for him, for herself, but she’s got nothing. She watches him for a while, the ease with which he sits reclined, surrounded by so many people and then asks the only question she can think of. 

“Why did you come back?” 

For the most part they have avoided mentioning their past together, but Ginny can’t stop the question from coming out. It has been bothering her. Aside from that one moment in the woods, he seems like such a different person, a happier person. If she knows what changed for him, maybe she’d be more successful at changing herself. After all, back then he was running away as much as she was. 

_Ginny wakes up slowly, coming into consciousness with a lethargic sort of clam that doesn’t often fill her bones. She’s warm, cozy, despite the fact that the sheet has fallen more than half way down her body, exposing her naked back to the cool air. There’s warmth surrounding her, a bubble of serenity, both from the late afternoon sun peeking through the mostly closed curtains and from the man sprawled across the bed beside her._

_She allows herself to stay in that half-awake, half-asleep plain, basking in the feeling of contentment, until she feels his warm hand start to run up and down her back tracing invisible patterns. Still, she continues to feign sleep, burying her face further into the pillow to hide her grin as memories from hours before flash through her mind._

_He has nearly lulled her back to sleep when the shape of his movements take form in her mind. Up across her left hip to nearly the centre of her back, splattered taps across her shoulder blades, a line from her ribs, a swirl on her other hip and then back to the beginning._

_She tenses under his touch and he instantly freezes, his finger hovering right above her skin. They stay like that for several long seconds until she can gather the courage to open her eyes and look at him._

_“I didn’t see them last night,” he says in explanation. He wouldn’t have, not only because the thin slivers of raised skin are nearly impossible to see without bright light, but because she keeps glamour charms covering them whenever the possibility of company exists. They must have worn off. She got comfortable. She got complacent._

_She’s sure he can feel her heart hammering away in her chest as she waits with trepidation for the inevitable questions. Her breathing is far from even, her muscles tense as a rock, but still, he says nothing. Eventually, the anticipation becomes too much. She opens her eyes looking straight towards where she can sense him watching her, determined to get this over with as quickly and painlessly as possible._

_Their eyes meet and she braces herself, but there’s nothing. No intrigue, no confusion or disgust or horror. Not an ounce of pity. It’s unnerving._

_“Ask the questions you want to ask,” she demands sharply, unable to take the silence any longer._

_“I don’t have any,” he tells her in an annoyingly calm voice._

_“Yeah, okay,” she says with an eye roll sliding out of bed. She’s not doing this. It’s time to go. Actually it’s hours past time to go._

_“Wait!” he cries out as she starts pulling her pants back on, some twinge of emotion finally invading his voice. “Firefly, don’t go.”_

_“I thought I told you to stop calling me that!” she responded with a huff. pulling her shirt over her head._

_“What am I supposed to call you then?” he asks, most of the cocky arrogance back._

_“Well, I don’t know, you could go with Luna,” she says sarcastically. When she first left home, she changed her name every few stops, determined that she wouldn’t make herself easy to find, but that got tiresome quickly. Eventually, she settled on Luna. It was familiar enough that she could remember it without much trouble, but random enough that she doesn’t think anyone would consider looking for her with it._

_“That’s not your real name.” It’s not a question, but a statement._

_She freezes with one sock in her hand and then turns to face him again._

_“Oh and James is yours” she snaps back._

_They stand stuck in a standoff for an indiscriminate amount of time, neither willing to just back down. Until eventually, she realizes that she’s doing exactly what he wants. With a shake of her head, she turns away from him again._

_“Wait!” he calls out again, but now there’s something truly desperate about his tone. “Just… wait.”_

_She hates herself a little for it, for being so eager, so desperate for his attention. Already she craves his acceptance. His ability to quiet the demons in her head. She stops a few steps from the door, but she remains standing stock straight, facing away from him as she listens to him shuffle out of bed behind her._

_When he appears in front of her, he’s wearing an old pair of pajama pants and a nervous expression. It takes her a few moments to understand what he’s showing her, but eventually a series of scares spanning across his chest and arms become visible. She has no doubt that they also cover his back. They’re rough and angry, so much more intense than the ones she sees in the mirror every day._

_“Really,” he says emphatically, “I don’t need to know.”_

_She looks in his eyes and an unspoken understanding between them. They can be this for each other, a safe spot to hide, a pit stop from all the running. No questions, no judgment, they can be without fear of discovery._

_He takes her hand and pulls her back towards the bed._

_She lets him._

After a silence so long that Ginny nearly gave up hope of him answering, he finally speaks. 

“Teddy” he responds pointing to a small boy who looks to be around five, spinning around with the other children.

_Bloody hell, he’s got a kid!_ Ginny thinks shocked, but really she shouldn’t be, not with the way that they met. 

“My godson.” he clarifies after a moment with a smirk, watching her with amusement. 

She narrows her eyes at him, but before she can say anything about his very purposeful pause, he continues turning serious. 

“I finally figured out that I needed to stop running, stop hiding. It wasn’t doing me or anyone else any favours…” 

She looks at him curiously, that wasn’t the answer she was expecting, but it probably should have been. 

“You helped me realize that” he tells her, looking straight at her and just like that, as she stares into his deep green eyes, another piece of her armor falls away. 

She’s screwed, totally and completely screwed even if she’s nowhere near admitting it.


	6. Chapter 6

By the time Ginny walks outside the next morning the usual summer temperatures are nothing but a distant memory, replaced with a cold wind and bright coloured trees. Within a fortnight those trees have lost their leaves and a layer of frost coats the ground when she leaves the Burrow every morning. 

Slowly and steadily they progress at the Blishwick house, inching closer and closer to the still unfounded, but hopefully there, answers at the end of the tunnel.

“Damn it!” she curses loudly one day a few weeks into December, slipping on a piece of loose stone again. The further they’ve progressed, the more uneven the ground has gotten. Now it is not uncommon to find large gaps in some places and with only wand light to guide them, well it’s been a bit of a mess. If she weren’t so determined that there were answers down there, so desperate for them, she’d admit to herself that it’s unlikely this passage has been traveled through in the last century, but she is, so instead of turning back, she just mutters obscenities at the ground.

“I swear, I’m not normally this…” she waves her hand through the air trying to find the right word, “volatile.”

Harry lets out a snort.

In the last month of working together, of seeing each other at family gatherings more often than not, they seemed to have found a rhythm to their relationship. She quickly realized that it’s infinitely easier to be okay with Harry when she’s physically with him. When they’re together it’s easy, it’s almost fun. They can laugh and joke and tease one another, they can go back and forth with each other with remarkable ease. It’s not perfect, far from it actually, but she no longer feels the need to shut down every time he appears. It’s comfortable, maybe too comfortable, but that’s a problem for another day.

Before she has that chance to rebuke his agreement, he continues softly “Yes you are… at least from what I remember.”

She turns to look at him sharply, standing there with a faraway look in his eyes. It seems like the perfect opportunity to ask the question that’s been on the tip of her tongue for a long while.

“What?” he asks tightly, but not unkindly.

Still, she hesitates; there’s definitely going to be a price to pay for asking the questions she wants to know and she can’t quite decide if it’s worth sating her curiosity. If she asks him, she’s going to be opening herself up for prodding in return. It’s another step down the rabbit hole of getting closer to him that she should really avoid taking at all costs.  
“Go ahead,” he prompts her with a sigh, perhaps already knowing what it is she wants to know.

“You remember?” It seems like the safest and easiest way to phrase the inquiry.

“You know, I’m actually surprised that it took you this long to ask. The Ginny Weasley I remember didn’t like mysteries all that much,” he teases, but the humour doesn’t reach his eyes.

“So you do remember me then.”

“Bits and pieces,” he says with a little shrug “It’s all there. It’s a common misconception, but memory charms don’t actually remove any memories, they just bury them under a layer of fog so deep that they normally don’t resurface, normally can’t resurface without serious invasive trauma.”

“But you’re not normal?” she retorts trying to infuse the situation with her own brand of humour. It doesn’t work any better than his attempt.

“So much of magic is about intent, we use incantations and movements to focus that intent, but it all comes down to the amount of will a witch or wizard puts into making something happen,” he continues to explain ignoring her crack.

She tries to follow along, but magical theory has never been her strongest area. She’s much better at figuring things out when there is a clear answer to be found. Still, as he sits there watching her patiently, the puzzle pieces start to come together, “You didn’t really want to erase the memories?”

“Oh I did, or at least I thought I did in the moment,” he lets out a ruthful laughter, “but the human need for self-preservation is remarkable.”

“Did you want to forget me?” she asks the question she really wants the answer to quietly, resolutely avoiding looking at him. She’s honestly not sure which version she would prefer, to be the thing he couldn’t bear to remember or the one he didn’t care to forget.

“No,” he says clearly once she has mustered up enough courage to look at him.

Ginny searches his eyes with a wary hesitancy, looking for the truth behind his statement, unwilling to let herself believe it without a careful examination. He lets her, keeping his face open, more open than she’s seen it since they reunited. 

After a moment, she finds what she’s looking for. There’s a sincerity in the way he’s looking at her, a sort of acceptance with a hint of regret. With that confirmation, she feels another layer of tension she didn’t know she was carrying around fall away. That was undoubtedly the answer that she was hoping for.

“By that point, my memory was so unstable—I’d cast the charm and it would work for a while, but then--- I don’t know if it was my magic fighting it off--- eventually they would come back and then, well, I’d cast them again and the cycle would repeat.”

She watches him struggle to explain something that he obviously doesn’t even really understand himself, the passage way full of secrets and answers totally forgotten for the moment. As he talks, she works to keep any trace of pity or horror off of her face. He doesn’t need to see that. She knows that if she was ever in his position that looks like that would end her willingness to open up.

"I only did it once more after we separated—“

She can’t help but roll her eyes at his phrasing. She’s good with him now, she was even okay back then, after a moment, frustrated and annoyed, sure, but not heart broken. Nevertheless, separated doesn’t seem like anywhere close to a sufficient way to describe the sting that still comes from thinking about that moment. 

He winces a little like he knows it was a bad word choice, but continues on without trying to apologize or backtrack. “And you were definitely not the target, but somehow the memory of you got mixed up in there and I was left with only fragments even after they started to come back.”

“And now?” she questions still not really understanding how all of this works.

“Now I think I have most of them back… being around you triggers them,” he answers, not quite meeting her eyes.

She wills herself not to blush at the memories that he’s been recovering.

“Okay back to work,” she says forcefully, needing to think about something else, to refocus her attention, before she does something reckless, she’s bound to regret.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
Their conversation, the first one directly about their shared past, changes things between them again. It’s not better or worse, just different, deeper maybe. Before it was easy to be happy around him, to be a version of herself that at one point she wasn’t sure even existed anymore, but now it’s good even when she doesn’t feel up to being that person. She can be her true self around him. It’s exhilarating, it’s dangerous.

With everyone else there’s this weight, this pressure to always be okay, to smile and laugh regardless of what is going on in her head, but with him, because he knows more about her past than anyone, it’s okay to not be okay.

Almost in spite of herself, she finds that most of her time after that is spent if not with Harry, at least around him. The Christmas season kicks off with a bang of spiced baking, tinsel covered trees, and ice skating. It’s a lot, sometimes too much, but for the most part she enjoys getting to spend the holidays with her family again after so many years away.  
Bill leaves on a three week trip to spend the holidays with Fleur’s family in France which lifts another weight off of her shoulders. In the weeks since their last confrontation, she’s seen him briefly, but he hasn’t made any more attempts to talk to her. He’s polite enough, normal enough that no one seems to have picked up on the tension, but she feels it every day, waiting in nervous anticipation for him to just show up again.

Christmas morning dawns bright and early with a pile of presents on her bed. It’s been years since she really celebrated properly. There was always a twinge of melancholy during her later Hogwarts years and then when she was away, she hardly bothered celebrating at all. It would be easy to let the thought of all the missed moments get her down, but there, surrounded by torn wrappings, snuggled in a new Weasley sweater, she decides that she’s going to make the most of it. 

Harry is there when she arrives downstairs, sipping a cup of tea and wearing his very own sweater and then he is there throughout the day laughing with her brothers and playing with her nieces and nephews. It crosses her mind that he fits in better with her family than she does nowadays, but then someone will pull her into the conversation and she’ll forget her misgivings.

“Oh hi,” Ginny says hours later, looking down surprised at Harry, “I thought you left?”

“I did,” he responds, brushing some of the softly falling snow off of his head, “but your Dad pulled me into see something and then when I was walking away I spotted you… and well, though I’d come say hi.”

Even after all this time spent together, he still seems hesitant around her sometimes like she’s going to curse him for looking at him the wrong way. It’s strange to say the least, he’ll approach her with all the confidence in the world and then freeze up when she shows an interest in him. It’s almost the complete opposite of her problem.

She pats the space beside her in invitation, which he takes looking around quickly and then Apparating. He then folds himself down carefully into the small spot. This space wasn’t really meant for one fully grown adult let alone two, but they make it work. Her knee touches his thigh when he settles. Their shoulders brush whenever either of them moves even a fraction. It’s the closest she’s been to him in years. He still smells the same.

“Do you hang out up here often?” he asks. There’s an amused tilt to his voice, but also a warmth.

“Well you know, can’t beat this view.” she says gesturing out towards the snow-covered yard sparkling with the stars. 

The reality is that with as many people living in this house as there were for most of her childhood, it was often near impossible to find a quiet place. She stumbled across this little ledge after a fight with someone, she can’t even remember who at this point, and it became her safe space. Nestled in between the second and third floor, a little bit of flat roof where her room doesn’t quite line up with Fred and George’s above her, it was the perfect place to hide out for a while.

Enclosed on three sides and only accessible through a series of elaborate climbing and jumping, no one has ever noticed it before. At least, until now. For a second, she wonders how Harry even saw her from all the way on the ground. If she were a different person, she might think it’s fate that he was able to sense her presence from so far away, but for now she pushes the thought away. More than anything, she just wants to enjoy this moment.

They sit there comfortably for what feels like hours, watching the moon steadily climb in the sky. It’s easier in the dark somehow, when she can only hear his voice, a whisper in the still night, and feel his warmth radiating beside her. When she doesn’t have to watch his face to measure the truth behind his words; when she doesn’t have to monitor her own reactions.

There’s a peace and a freedom to the night.

She leans her head gently against his shoulder. He wraps his arm around her.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
After that it’s hard to ignore the fact that she’s falling fast, faster than she ever thought possible. It’s that fear and maybe a bit of wisdom that has her knocking on the door to Shell Cottage only a few weeks into January.

She needs to unload some of this weight she’s been carrying around and really, she can’t think of a better person than the one who’s been begging her to talk for months.  
“Ginny!” Bill exclaims, surprised when he opens the door to reveal her standing calmly with a brightly knitted hat and a worn pair of gloves.

“Want to go for a walk?” She offers the invitation to finally talk after clearing her voice.

He looks her up and down and says nothing, leaving her to wonder for a moment if maybe she’s too late, maybe she’s denied him one too many times and now she’s about to get a door slammed in her face.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, reaching to grab his coat from the hook beside the door. Calling out to Fleur that he’ll be back in a bit, he shuts the door and steps beside her.

They don’t talk for a while, walking along the snow-covered beach in a companionable silence. It’s cold outside, brisk, especially with the wind coming off of the sea, but it’s also bright and sunny. Two conflicting elements seems like a perfect reflection of the conversation they are about to have.

“What’s going on Ginny?” he asks after a while, gallantly taking the first step.

She hums quietly to herself, even though she came here with the sole purpose of talking with him, she can’t seem to get the words out. Everything that is happening right now with Harry is so fresh that she doesn’t have the words to explain it to herself, let alone Bill.

“Do you want to finally tell me what happened, why you left?” he asks instead, probably sensing her reluctance.

Why she left. That’s— well that’s a lot. “How about I tell you how it all started?” she offers instead.

_When she finds a small card tucked into her Herbology textbook a few weeks after Christmas break with a message telling her to be in the Astronomy Tower at midnight if she wants to make a difference, she should be wary. When she arrives there and a disorienting charm is placed over her, she should be scared, but instead she’s just excited. It’s the moment she’s been waiting for, a chance to finally stop sitting on the sidelines and do something._

_The lights are disorienting when she is finally able to see again after an indiscriminate amount of time and walking. Ginny surveys the space around her. She’s still definitely in the castle, the walls and floors are all familiar, but she doesn’t think she’s ever been here before. It’s not the typical classroom setting or like any one of the numerous empty rooms that are designated as study halls. It’s bigger, stretching far from one side to the other and empty, the sound echos faintly when she taps her shoe._

_She’s not tied up or anything, there’s nothing holding her here other than an uncertainty as to how to get back to familiar ground. She can still feel her wand secure in her back pocket. It’s all fine._

_With her relative safety confirmed for the time being, she feels confident enough to continue her careful perusal of the space. From what she can see in the dim light of the moon shining in through the sole window, there are 5 other people in the room, likely all older than her if size is any indication._

_“Well, what’s the plan?” she asks, directing her question to the member closest to her, doing her best to instill confidence in her tone._

_No one answers and Ginny feels the restlessness start to take hold inside her again. “Take down Umbridge? Stop corruption from taking hold of the ministry? Prevent Voldemort from regaining power?”_

_“No,” comes a firm voice as a tall figure finally steps forward to talk to her._

_“No,” she splutters confused. “The note said make a difference, how exactly were you planning on doing that then?”_

_The woman, she sees now that she’s closer, raises an eyebrow at her tone but makes no comments otherwise. “No to stopping the Dark Lord.”_

_Ginny feels a sinking sensation in her stomach, she takes in the group again formed in a semi circle around her with raised hoods. “Okay... I think there’s been some kind of mix up. I’m firmly on the other side. Thanks for the invitation, but I’m going to go.”_

_She starts to step slowly towards the door she saw in her initial surveillance of the space, but is stopped short by a snort from behind one of the hoods. “I told you this was a terrible idea, her thinking is too… limited for something like this.”_

_“Hush,” the woman who seems to be the leader commands. Turning slightly, she addresses Ginny again, “What we are doing here, it has nothing to do with sides, it’s not about death eaters versus order members or Gryffindor versus Slytherin. It’s about all the things in between that are going to fall through the cracks while each side is too focused on taking down each other.”_

_She listens in rapt attention as their crusade is laid out for her, but the reality is that she is sold before the first sentence is finished leaving her mouth. It might not be what she initially envisioned when she dreamed about taking a stand, but it works much better than she could have ever anticipated. When it comes down to it, all she’s ever wanted to do was make a difference, to add some positivity back into the world to counteract all the darkness._

_“In here,” she is reminded before she leaves that first night, “you’re not a Gryffindor or a Weasley, just someone with the knowledge and the will to do what’s necessary to keep the world from falling apart.”_

_The new mission gives her the sense of purpose that she wanted so desperately. She spends almost every free second, and even some seconds that should surely be devoted to other things, in that room learning and studying and sharing in the hopes that one day, when everything starts to fall apart, they will be able to jump in and be the support._

_As the year goes on they manage to recruit more members until there’s enough of them that there is always someone hanging around headquarters, as they’ve started calling it. Sometimes, it’s hard, especially with so many different perspectives hanging around, but ultimately, it’s more than worth it. She considers things, learns things that she never would have even considered if not for those people._

_By the end of the school year they’ve gathered a sizable group together. They call themselves the Adrestia order._

A huff of astonishment from beside her, pulls Ginny out of her story. She turns her eyes away from the horizon where she had been focused on while recounting her tale, to look at her wide eyed brother.

“The Adrestia...” he says under his breath in quiet disbelief.

She feels her forehead wrinkle in confusion. “I thought you suspected?”

He turns to face her fully, looking her up and down with a new appreciation. It makes her vastly uncomfortable. “Suspected that you were a part of something yeah, that you were a part of that… never.”

The minutes drag on as he continues to watch her with awe and she has to force herself to not fidget under his gaze.

“Wait,” he says startled, “are you telling me that one of the major players during the war was composed entirely of school children!?”

She can’t help but shake her head at the nativity of his surprise. For some reason, people always underestimate kids, thinking that they have no place in the fight, when really, it was their fight to begin with. Still, she doesn’t say any of that. It’s not her responsibility to change his thinking. Instead she shrugs a little, “you have to know that I can’t tell you that.”

His eyes turn a little darker at that, the glee and awe at finally learning her secret being replaced with skepticism as he remembers what the group that was initially praised for saving people turned into.

“Can’t or won’t?” he asks, his mouth set in a serious line.

“Both,” she responds without hesitation.

She watches the apprehension grow for a moment with a slight annoyance before she feels the need to intervene.

“It’s not like they’re going to come find me and kill me if I told you anything, but it’s also not actually possible for me to tell you some things,” she tells him, looking up at the clouds trying to be patient.

He starts to interject, but she talks over him, “and that was for my protection as much as theirs.”

When she looks at him again out of the corner of her eye, she sees that his face is set in a stern, but puzzled expression.

“I really don’t know if I actually believe you,” he says after a moment with a little laugh, more crazed than amused.

When he sees the unimpressed look she’s directing at him, he starts to backtrack. “I don’t think you’re lying to me… it’s just—I can’t seem to wrap my mind around it, you out there fighting, doing the things that I know they did.”

She saw this coming, but still she would really rather not have had to do this. With a sigh, she twists her body around so that her side is facing him and then lifts up her shirt and jacket so that her hip is visible.

“They branded you?” he asks in horror.

“I did this to myself,” she tells him firmly, “I choose this.”

“Why though?” he questions distraughtly, his fingers reaching out to brush against the raised skin.

“It was a tool like anything else.”

_“We need a better system,” Ginny complains to the group throwing her cloak off with a frustrated huff, a few weeks into fifth year. Attacks had been increasing with an alarming regularity and so far they haven’t managed to arrive to a single one with enough time to do any good. “We are absolutely no good to anyone if we get there 20 minutes after the fact.”_

_“That’s not exactly true,” a small voice pipes up. Ginny turns to face the voice doing her best to temper her frustrations. Most of the people that they’ve found are loud and passionate, stubborn, a lot like her, but there’s a few, especially the younger ones, who don’t handle the forcefulness quite so well._

_The decision to bring in some younger students was a fight, a long and tiresome one that showed some very real cracks in the morality of the group, but ultimately it was agreed upon. Or rather, someone brought another kid along one day, no one ever said anything and that was the end of it._

_After a moment, he continues, bolstered by the fact that no one made any objections. “We’ve done good. There are still several shops open that wouldn’t be without our protection charms and today there would have been many more fatalities if we hadn’t been there with binding charms and blood replenishing potions.”_

_Ginny just huffs. So they’ve done something, that doesn’t mean it’s enough. Every day, more people are disappearing, presumed dead or worse. For every shop that they help stay open, another two close. They are already falling short and the real fighting hasn’t even started yet._

_“She’s right. We need a better plan. We need to be faster, smarter.”_

_It takes them a while, much longer than she’d like, but eventually they come up with a solution. A mark, a rune, etched somewhere on each of them that will burn whenever they are called._   
_“But what if we are in class?” one of the more Ravenclawy Ravenclaws asks, scandalized._

_“The burning would be temporary,” the brains behind the spell explains exasperated, “just long enough for you to realize it’s there and then gone.”_

_“And you wouldn’t have to answer the call.” It’s a stark reminder that when they go out there they go alone, in and out as effectively as possible because no one is coming to save you. At first the whole concept seemed foolish to Ginny, working alone, but now she’s thankful for it. In the heat of a fight it allows her to have a singular focus, a razor sharp resolve._

_There are a few more complaints and a couple hold outs, but by the end of the semester they all have identical symbols somewhere hidden on their body. A constant reminder of their promise to uphold society and the weight that promise holds._

By the time she’s finished with her explanation, Bill still doesn’t seem altogether satisfied, but he knows better than to push. Or at least she thinks he does until he opens his mouth.

“And how does Harry tie into all of this?” he asks knowingly.

“He doesn’t,” she responds stubbornly, folding her arms protectively in front of her.

“Really?” he questions with a raised eyebrow.

“Bill…” she says maybe a little more pleadingly than she means to. It’s already been a long day, they have been sitting out here talking for so long that she’s nearly forgotten what it’s like to feel her. Besides that she’s tired, if not physically, then at least emotionally. This is by far the most she’s ever shared about her life, period, let alone about such an unstable time in her life.

“Okay,” he relents after a moment and she lets out a sigh of relief, standing up stiffly.

“Just,’ he starts hesitantly like he’s unsure if what he is about to say is going to push her over the edge and undo all of the process they just made.

She freezes beside him, waiting nervously for what she’s not quite sure.

“You deserve to be happy okay… I know things were hard, or actually I don’t, not really, but I’m starting to and no matter what you had to do or what you saw, it’s over now. You’re free to be happy… with whoever makes you happy.”

She feels an unexpected tingling in her eye. Up until that moment, she didn’t really realize how much she needed to hear that. It’s not like she needs permission to be happy, from him or anyone. Or even if Harry is where that happiness is to be found, to be honest, she’s not sure that she wants it to be, but just having the possibility in front of her, of seeing a future where she’s happy, it heals something within her.


	7. Chapter 7

“I can’t do it anymore,” Ginny says, falling dramatically into the booth beside Ron a week later.

“Oi! What are you doing here?” he asks, shoving her away from him with a scowl.

“You invited me…” she tells him, pulling off her scarf and situating herself more comfortably. 

She hears Harry snort from across the table and then cover it with a cough. She doesn’t take Ron’s surprise personally. Since she’s been back, he has invited her out countless times and she has never once showed an ounce of interest. The fact that she’s here now, sitting in the crowded pub on a Friday night has equal parts to do with the man sitting across from them and an overarching need to get out of that house. 

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d actually come…” She shoves him good naturedly away from her and into the wall which he responds to by pulling her hair. Not one to be out maneuvered, she relentlessly digs her fingers into his side looking for the spot that she knows for experience will send him squealing.

“Okay, okay, that’s enough,” he says with a wince holding his hands protectively in front of him. Pushing her hair back into place, she chances a glance at Harry. He’s grinning at their antics, but there’s a wishful glint to his eye. 

She makes a sudden dash towards Ron again before retreating back into her spot calmly and innocently, just to make him flinch one more time. The move has its desired effect. When she looks back over at Harry, there’s nothing but amusement in his expression. She’ll consider that a success even though it comes at her brother’s expense.

Harry tips his head slightly in acknowledgment of her efforts which she returns with a rare genuine smile. Not at all aware of the relationship between the two of them, past or present, Ron takes one look at her and then groans, attributing her good humour to gloating. She’s more than fine letting him think that, even if it means he continues to glare at her, shooting her hands dirty looks whenever she moves a fraction, for far longer than necessary.

“What can’t you do?” Harry asks in lieu of Ron’s continued silence.

She starts up, remembering her initial greeting, “can’t stay there another night, it’s going to end _very_ bad if I do, I can’t be held responsible for my actions.”

“Please excuse my lovely sister here,” Ron says, finally coming out of his mood just in time to mock her, _typical_ . “She has some violent tendencies. We tried to get her committed years ago but no one would take her. I’d say there’s nothing to worry about…. But, well, I’d be lying. As far as we know, only one of her victims has sustained lasting damage.”

“You’re hilarious,” she deadpans, even as a dark shadow passes over her. Ron’s joking, clearly, but what he’s saying is not that far from the truth, even if he doesn’t know it. Across her mind, there’s a brief picture of a man in dark robes and a white mask hovering threateningly over a helpless figure. Then a bright flash of green shooting out of her wand without a second thought.

“I’m going to get a refill,” Harry says breaking her out of the memory. “Do you want something?” he asks her, hesitating at the edge of the table.

She looks at him in slight confusion before remembering her brother’s presence beside her. “Yes, if you don’t mind.”.”

Quickly, she rattles off her usual, enjoying the slight smile on his face as he turns that tells her that he already knew the answer. The thought fills her with warmth effectively replacing the coolness brought forth from the memory.

She switches on to the newly empty side telling herself that it’s the rational move. Harry could be a long time, with the lines, he probably will be. There’s no need for them to be squished together when there’s a perfectly good alternative, but even as she moves, she knows it’s a lie. She would just much rather be pressed up against Harry.

Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, that doesn’t become a reality. When Harry returns carrying two tall glasses, Ron gets up to give him his seat, muttering about some witch that just walked into the pub. He leaves the two of them sitting there with nothing but a “don’t be weird,” hastily thrown in her direction.

“You know, I have a place,” Harry says after a moment of them sitting in silence.

She raises her eyebrow, that proposition sounds awfully familiar. It must to him as well after a second because a faint blush starts to cover his cheeks. “I don’t mean it like _that_ …. I didn’t back then either.”

“Uh huh,” she mutters, teasing him.

He just shakes his head at her, but there’s a cheerful glint to his eyes. “I actually have another room this time. I mean, it’s a tiny bed and the ceiling is covered in glowing stars, but it’s yours if you want it.”

“I do like the stars,” Ginny says leaning a little further over the table, a little closer to him.

“Yeah, I know you do,” he responds with a grin, taking a sip of his drink. 

She grins back at him for a moment, not caring that anyone could look over at any second and realize instantly that there’s something more between them, that they are most definitely more than just casual acquaintances.

Having played with fire long enough, Ginny leans back into the worn leather seating and takes her own sip, unconsciously mirroring his movements. “And how would Teddy feel about having to share his room with some strange red head.”

“He’s rather partial to redheads,” he remarks quickly, clearly referring to her entire family who have welcomed him into the fold with remarkable ease. The look of fondness that washes his face tells her that the little boy isn’t the only one who’s thankful to have the adopted family. 

Turning more serious, he continues, “really though, if you ever need a place to stay, it’s there. He doesn’t sleep there often right now, but with everything, after everything-- I just want him to have a place with me.” 

She hums in acknowledgment of the offer, but neither accepts nor declines, choosing instead to move the conversation on to safer topics. They end up talking about work and Quidditch easily until Ron returns bringing an extra chair with him. She spends the rest of the night, much longer than she anticipated, sitting right there laughing as Ron details stories of their childhood. Occasionally she catches Harry’s eye and he’ll send her a little half smile, a secret moment just between the two of them.

She doesn’t go home with him that night or the next, but the invitation lingers in her mind like an unfulfilled promise.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
“I think we should call it a day,” Harry tells her the next day, casually throwing a stone against the wall and then reaching out to catch it before it hits the ground. It’s remarkable what a few short months have done to change the dynamic between them. Now, she is comforted by the sound of his small movements as she works rather than annoyed.  
“No, I want to figure this out first,” she responds stubbornly, but not heatedly.

“At least take a break,” he says gesturing to the empty space beside him in encouragement, “maybe it will help.”

She knows that he’s trying to help, he has been much more than she could have ever anticipated, but they haven’t made any progress in hours and she knows that he is getting restless. Hell, _she’s_ restless. They’re so close, she can feel it in her bones, but she can’t quite solve the last piece of the puzzle. There’s something she’s missing, some clue, she just doesn’t know what.

It’s incredibly irritating. 

For a second, she’s tempted to throw something and not in the calm, controlled way he is either, but instead she settles for falling on to the rough ground beside him with a groan.

“Want to try and talk it out?” he offers softly, fingers fiddling gently with the tips of her hair. This kind of casual physicality has become the norm over the last few weeks to the point where she’s not sure if he even realizes what he’s doing anymore. For her part, she knows that sometimes she has her hand resting comfortingly on his arm before the thought of what she’s doing has even really registered.

“No,” she moans, letting her head fall against his shoulder. She stays there for a moment trying to absorb some of the calm that he seems to emulate from him effortlessly. The reality is that he is right, they should just call it a day. She’s not going to make any progress until she figures it out and that requires time, time that doesn’t need to happen down in this dark and dusty tunnel.

_Although_ , she thinks morosely, _this atmosphere might be preferable to the Burrow’s light and warm kitchen when her mother is involved._ Whatever respite her extended absence had granted her from her mother’s desire to meddle has long since ended. 

Ginny groans again, burying her face further into his shirt just thinking about the last time her Mother caught her with no one else around.  
“You’ll get it eventually,” he assures her, misinterpreting her annoyance.

“It’s not that,” she clarifies, “if we call it a day that means I have to go home…” She can feel his confusion without having to even look. “To my mother.”  
He lets out a snort, “she can’t possibly be that b—“  
Her glare stops him before he can be foolish enough to finish that sentence.

“Of course you’d think that, she loves you.” She can tell that he wants to dispute her claim, but is holding his tongue. Rationally, she knows that her mother loves her and that she means well, but her pointed questions about her lack of love life or her seemingly confused career path are all just a bit too much for her sanity.

“Well…” he starts hesitantly, “you don’t have to go home…”

He looks down at her and seems to gain confidence. “Come over to my place, you don’t have to stay-- we can have some dinner and then you can head home when the coast is clear.”

She looks up at him, the hopeful glimmer in his eyes, and feels a smile start to tug at the corner of her mouth. How could she ever say no to an offer like that.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
He opens the door to his apartment and then motions for her to follow him inside which she does eagerly. It’s a small space, much smaller than she knows he could afford, even downtown London. From her position at the front door, she can see almost the entire living space, a single couch with a Muggle television on one side and then a modest kitchen with an island on the other.

She slowly pulls off her coat and then hands it to him to hang up alongside his as she continues to look around. The dark wood floors and rich coloured wall create a desirable homey feel, but that’s about the extent of the feeling. She walks slowly through the space trying to find any hint of personalization, a hastily discarded pullover, an abandoned newspaper, but there’s nothing, nothing at all to make this place feel like his. It’s almost like no one lives here, like it’s just a hotel room, a temporary place to land. 

In fact, the more she thinks about it, this place looks just like the one he brought her to all those years ago. 

_“Well, this is it,” he says to her, flipping on the lights to display the single room. It’s small, crowded with one full size bed taking up the majority of the free space, but it’s still undoubtedly much nicer than the place she would have returned to if she hadn’t lost her limited funds._

_“Make yourself comfortable,” he says stepping further into the room, turning on lamps as he goes._

_She follows him slowly, letting her bag that they stopped to retrieve slide off her shoulder. There’s not much in it, just a few changes of clothes, some basic toiletries and a few coins at the bottom, but still she is hesitant to let something familiar go in such an unfamiliar setting._

_She looks around to try and get a gage for who this man might be, but there’s nothing around to give her any clues. The space is uncommonly clean. It’s only the bag sitting neatly tucked in the corner and the familiarity with which he moves around that convinces her that they aren’t in some random person’s apartment._

_“Would you like something to drink?” he offers standing in front of a Muggle refrigerator._

_He runs his hand through his hair awkwardly when it takes her a second too long to answer, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Not that it’s her delay that’s making this situation uncomfortable. Somewhere in the time it took for them to walk up the three flights of stairs to get to his place, an awkward tension has settled between them._

_“I can go…” she offers._

_“No it’s fine,” he says quickly, so quickly that she starts to worry in the back of her mind that he’s got something sinister planned for her. Before that thought can truly take hold, he’s speaking again._

_“Sorry... I don’t do this very often.”_

_She raises her eyebrow in scepticism, here with actual lighting it's clear that he’s more than averagely attractive. Add that with his charmingly cocky grin and his habit of saving people that she already knows is inherent, she’s sure women are all over him._

_“I didn’t say I don’t do that often.” He lets that grin over take his face, “but this isn’t that right?”_

_Not for the first time tonight, she wonders who this guy is and where he came from._

“You never talk about your past…” she says faintly confirming her suspicions that there are no photos of any kind to be found. He freezes up instantly at her observation which is the absolute last thing that she wants. “I didn’t mean anything by that— just I don’t know, this place, the lack of pictures, it caught me by surprise I guess.”

She feels her face start to colour. Normally it’s the other way around and she’s the one who looks across at him with thinly veiled amusement. The bizarreness of the role reversal helps to ease some of the tension from his shoulders, but there’s still a line of doubt across his forehead like he’s not quite sure what path to take forward. 

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she says. 

Despite her offer, he continues to look conflicted taking a seat heavily on one of the island chairs. As he thinks, she does her best to hide her eagerness from him. She’ll stand by her promise, but there’s no denying that she is curious. At this point, he knows a lot about her early life just by virtue of being around her family, while she knows essentially nothing about his life. She can't help feeling like it’s a little unbalanced. 

He looks over at her again, a determined yet anxious expression over taking his features. “What do you want to know?”

She looks at him, at the rigid set to his body seated right on the edge of his chair and feels a wave of shame wash over her. This isn’t fair, isn’t right. She thinks back to his understanding gaze all those years ago when she wasn’t ready to talk. Moving quickly, she takes the seat beside him. Without thinking, she grabs his hand in hers. 

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she says again with more conviction, looking straight into his eyes so that he’ll see the truth of her statement. 

He watches her from a moment, she can feel the clamminess of his hand, and then clarity, “I think… I think I’d like to.”

He looks away from her then, focusing on the titled pattern of the backsplash, but also undoubtedly the memories playing in his mind. Still, he keeps his hand in hers.

“I’m going to assume that you know the early stuff, the public stuff,” he glances over at her quickly for confirmation which she gives albeit a little reluctantly. With the amount of times she heard his story as a child, well she might know it better than her own, but that’s not something she really likes to think about. The crush she used to have on the Boy Who Lived is so vastly different from what she feels for the man beside her, it’s hard to comprehend that they are the same person. 

“I spent most of my childhood with my aunt and uncle— my mother’s sister— and they were, well, they were hard people to live with. They’re Muggles and they hated magic which I think transformed into hating me. Not that I understood that at the time, for the first 10 years of my life I knew nothing of the magical world.”

Logically, she knew that his story wasn’t going to be very happy, but that’s not at all what she pictured. She never once considered that it all started for him that early on. Her heart breaks for a younger Harry, confused as to why the people who are supposed to love him don’t. She’s glad that he's not looking at her, because he would be sure to see the sorrow on her face. 

“Then one day a man came up to me and changed my life. He told me that he was my parents’ best friend and that if I’d like, he would take me away. He was skinny and haggard looking with scruffy beard and tangled hair. His clothes were ripped and covered in dirt, but I went with him without a second thought. I think that’s just about all you need to know to gather what life was like for me with my Aunt and Uncle.” 

“He was my god father,” he adds on quickly like it’s an important detail that he doesn’t want to forget. She notes the use of past tense without much surprise. 

“You didn’t go to Hogwarts,” she recalls trying to help him find his footing in the story again, “did you go somewhere else?”

“No. We uhh-- we moved around a lot, never staying in one place for longer than a couple months. He was a good guardian, he loved me and really that’s more than I could have even dreamed of at that point in my life, but he was a bit… broken. The years in Azkaban, and really the years in the war before that, plus losing my parents, it all kind of messed with his mind. He did his best, and most of the time it was fine, but he was paranoid. Paranoid that we would be found, always afraid that things were following us.” 

He lets out a humourless laugh, “I thought he was crazy, I didn’t care, but I thought he had lost it. And then out of nowhere I get swept up by a portkey and taken to a graveyard where I’m forced to fight for my life.” 

Though her various connections and years involved at the ground level of the war, she knows that that was the moment Tom came back to full form. Harry would have been at most 15, probably younger. The thought makes her sick. 

“After that, well he didn’t seem so crazy anymore, but the paranoia increased. We settled here in England and from that point until the day Voldemort went down for the final time, every waking moment was devoted to training and then trying to stop him. He pushed the training hard in that first year, but I was eager enough to actually get to do magic that it didn’t matter, I embraced it wholeheartedly. Looking back now, I think he was just scared that he was going to lose me like he lost my dad…”

He trails off, overcome with emotion for a moment. She waits patiently, keeping a steady grip on his hand until he starts again. 

“At first— don’t get me wrong, I knew it was serious, I knew it was important, but all the training was exciting, I did it because it was fun. And then, shit happened and it all became very real. He died, or rather was killed.” 

“And you were all alone,” she gasps out faintly before she can stop herself. 

“Then? No. We had brought other people in to help teach me, old friends of his, people who had the right skill set, but by the end… pretty much.” He says it simply, like it’s just another fact of his life, but she can see the toll it takes on him. 

He doesn’t need to say the actual words for her to know that every last one of them are dead and that they didn’t die peacefully either. His words from their first conversation back together echo in her mind _I couldn’t live with the memories inside my head, the ghosts of the people I lost._

Just as she’s preparing to give him an out, he continues, “anyways, after that I trained, I worked. My sole focus was taking him down, not just because I knew he was coming for me, but because I knew with every fibre of my being that I didn’t want to live in a world of his creation.”

They sit there in silence for a moment, absorbing the details, both of them weighted down by his past. It’s not quite awkward but it’s close, closer than they’ve been in a long while. 

_His quip has the desired effect, making her smile, but it only does so much towards clearing the awkwardness from the room. Neither of them know what to say, what to do. The reality is that this is foreign ground for both of them._

_She ends up sitting lightly on the edge of one of the bar stools, a glass of water clutched in her hand._ If only this were something a little stronger. Why didn’t they stop for something a little stronger? _The buzz she had going from earlier has all but disappeared leaving her with nothing to quiet the voices in her head._

_“How about this weather,” he tries a tinge of the same desperation that’s coursing through her coloring his voice, “it’s really hot--”_

_He cuts off when he sees her expression. She will go sleep on a park bench before she resorts to talking about the weather._ It is unseasonably hot, _she thinks maniacally._

_She must make a sound, halfway between a laugh and a gasp, mixed with a snort because he looks up at her startled. Their eyes meet and something like kinship passes between them at the situation they have somehow found themselves in._

_Then he looks away and they are back sitting awkwardly trying to avoid eye contact._

This is ridiculous, _she thinks resolutely placing her glass loudly on the counter and standing up. It’s awkward because it’s unfamiliar. Time to change that._

Eventually he gets up, pulling his hand from hers for the first time in an hour. She fears the worst when he starts to walk away, fears that he’s closing himself off again, but there’s an unexpected lightness to the way he moves. Like instead of pulling him back to the past, telling her has finally allowed him to move past it. 

He positions himself so that he is a few steps away from her, leaning casually against the counter. She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, an anxious tick that she thought she got rid of a long time ago. She doesn’t know what’s happening between them, but it’s definitely something.

“Thanks for telling me,” she says genuinely.

“Thanks for listening,” he responds back with a smile.

The air is heavy in the small space, loaded down with tension and weight, but this time it’s different. This time there’s the promise of something better. It;s clear in the way he’s looking at her, full of hope, but before she’s got a chance to figure it out, he’s closing the distance between them.

And then he’s kissing her.

_She looks him up and down quickly, and then not so quickly, as she closes the distance between them. There’s something about him, some magnetic connection that wants to pull her closer to him. He looks up startled to see her approaching, he starts to say something, but she doesn’t let that slow her down._

_When she reaches him, stretching to connect her mouth with his mid-sentence, there’s no hesitation. She wants this, wants him despite whatever the consequences might be tomorrow. It takes a moment, but then he’s responding, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close like he doesn’t want to ever let go._

He remains steady, not pushing, but not pulling away either, just giving her a second to process and a second is all it takes. Her body comes alive first, lips moving against his in a familiar dance, long before her brain has managed to catch up. 

Then it does and she’s kissing Harry, really kissing him. Her hand tangles in his hair. Her legs wrap around him, pulling him closer. He lets out a desperate groan sliding his hands over her arms and down her back to brace himself on her hips. 

_They stay locked in position, learning each other’s taste, the concept of breathing not important for the moment. She tangles her hands in his hair. He runs his hands up and down her back. They explore each other’s bodies._

Eventually, she needs more. She pushes back against him, rising from her seat. Doing her best to keep their bodies intertwined, she slowly walks him back towards the sofa she saw on the way in, it will work perfectly until she can figure out where his bedroom is. 

As she walks, she pushes her hands under his shirt, lifting until he gets the memo. They break apart briefly for him to accomplish his task which allows her to remove her own shirt. 

_It doesn’t take long for the careful exploration to turn into a frenzied mission to get as close to each other as possible. He rips his shirt off eagerly while she fights with the zipper on her dress. Before she has a chance to get it, he’s spinning her around and doing it for her, letting his fingers graze her heated flesh as he does._

_They don’t talk at all as they move towards the bed, leaving a trail of discarded clothes behind them, choosing instead to communicate with lingering touches and heated looks._

He starts to say something as he wrestles with the garment, but his words fall away when he sees her. Within a second, his hands are back on her, exploring the newly exposed skin. She shivers under his touch, his fingers gliding against her skin, increasing the desire within her. 

She starts to move towards the couch with more purpose. 

“No wait, shit, I didn’t mean for,” he says with a frenzied gasp for air. 

She pulls back with a raised eyebrow in question and a grin on her face. 

“Okay I did—” he admits. That’s enough confiormation for her, she reaches back for he’s belt buckle. 

“I just wanted to kiss you,” he says breathlessly, eyes half lidded as she slides her hand closer to where he wants it. 

As desperate as she is for him, his revelation makes her pause. She looks at him, really looks at him and then after a second, he opens his eyes and looks at her too. It’s different this time, the startling realization passes over her as she stares into his eyes. It’s not going to just be just sex. It’s so much more. Surprisingly, the thought doesn’t terrify her. 

Kissing him, being here with him, it feels safe. The indescribable feeling from before; he feels like home.

_They land on the bed in a mess of tangled limbs and Ginny can’t help smiling to herself, this is exactly what she needed. Here, as he trails his hands over her curves following then the path with his mouth, this is familiar ground. It’s comfortable, in the best way imaginable. She’s good at this, passion and chemistry she can work with._

Standing up on her tippy toes, she swings her arms around his neck and then leans in. This time the kiss is sweeter somehow, a kiss for kiss’ sake, made without any intention of it leading somewhere more. The urgency is still there tingling under her skin, but for now, she’s willing to ignore it in favour of this moment. 

“I’m glad you did,” she whispers, pulling back a fraction, just enough to allow her words to come out clearly. 

“Yeah.” She can feel his grin against her lips without having to look down. 

“Yeah,” she echos in confirmation before moving back in. 

His hands flutter against her waist as the passion grows between them again, his thumbs tracing little patterns back and forth against her hip bones. She tangles her hands in his hair, scratching at his scalp slightly. He hums in agreement at the movement, sliding his hands around to her backside. 

She pushes against him intending for him to fall back towards the couch, but instead he uses the movement to lift her up. Her legs instinctively wrap around him. 

“Couch,” she mumbles, as he trails kisses down her neck, trying to make her brain work. 

“Couch,” he repeats just as breathlessly, continuing on his mission to drive her crazy. She nudges his back with her foot to get him to move. This is great, more than great, and she could quite happily have him carrying her around forever, but right now she wants more and that’s not happening in this position. 

“Right,” he says slowly moving towards the sofa. Just as he’s about to put her down and then hopefully fall on top of her, he stops. 

“Actually,” he spins around walking forward with purpose now, “bedroom.” 

She moans partly annoyed at the delay, partly amused, but mostly aroused. His voice, rough and deep, does things to her. He lets out a chuckle placing a lingering kiss on her chest. 

For a second, she thinks about kicking him, the possibility of falling be damned, but then they pass through the doorway to his room and she quickly loses all ability to think.


	8. Chapter 8

Ginny wakes up to the feeling of someone watching her, not in a threatening way, but it’s still a little disconcerting all the same. Stretching out, she encounters resistance and a warm smile slides across her face as memories from hours before flash through her mind. When she opens her eyes, Harry is there, head resting comfortably against one hand, watching her just as she expected.

“Don’t go getting creepy on me now,” she jokes, poking him her toe to try and get him to look away. It’s uncomfortable, being examined so closely. She can feel a red flush spreading across her chest, even as she forces herself to not look away. 

He lets out a laugh, full bodied and carefree. It’s amazing.

An involuntary smile tugs at her lips, it’s impossible to even pretend to be annoyed when he’s that happy beside her.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” she asks slightly put off. They could have been using their limited time together much more effectively.

“I knew that as soon you were awake, you’d have to go,” he says softly, like it’s an embarrassing secret, focusing on tracing the pattern of the bed instead of her.

“Harry,” she says quietly, her fondness for him growing by the minute. She takes his hand, stopping his movements. “It's not like that okay? I’d stay, but then my parents would know that I was out all night and I’m just not ready to deal with that.”

He tangles their hands together more fully and she can’t help but be mesmerized by the picture it makes.

“And that’s the only reason, right? This, here, it’s more than just one night? We’re…. something now?”

“We damn well better be after that,” she says, smiling at him to take any sting out of her words.

“Well, if you insist,” he says playfully, pulling her closer to him. 

“Hey!” she says slapping his chest lightly from her position on top of him, “I’m a catch!”

He threads his hands through her hair, pulling it back so she can see him clearly, “you sure as hell are.”  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
When Ginny lands at the edge of the Burrow’s protections, it’s still dark out, but she can see the edges of the sun just starting to peek over the horizon. It’s much later, or rather earlier, than she’d like, Harry’s talented hands and charming grin distracting her for far longer than they should have. Still, she can’t bring herself to care, even knowing that her parents will be up and moving any minute. Nothing can touch her today, nothing can bring her down, not even by the alerting charm that she disables before stepping onto the landing outside her door.

She slips into her room without any disturbances, closing her door softly behind her and then collapsing in her bed. She doesn’t sleep, can’t with the excitement coursing through her, but she lays there for a while, giving herself the time she needs to regain her composure. Going downstairs right now would be a dead giveaway. No matter what she does, she can’t seem to keep the glowing smile off her face.

Back when she first realized that the Harry from her family’s letters was actually the man from all those years, she thought that maybe it was meant to be, maybe there was an unconscious force leading her back here, leading her back to him. After all, what’s the likelihood that out of all the people in the world he could have connected to, he somehow found his way into her family? There had to be a reason, maybe it was to give them a second chance. 

While those fantasies of them living happily ever after were quickly dashed, if she’s honest, she always held out a bit of hope that they would eventually find their way back to one another. And now that they have, well, it doesn’t quite feel like her life.

Since she woke up this morning, warm and comfortable with him beside her, she’s been waiting for the fantasy to end, for her to wake up with a start, or find out that she’s been accidentally drugged by one of the twins’ new products. Yet, despite her skepticism, she’s still here. It actually happened.

It’s only once both her parents are safely downstairs and moving around the kitchen that she moves into action, heading to take a quick shower before anyone notices she’s awake. She stops short, however, at her reflection in the mirror. The girl staring back at her looks happy, unrestrainedly happy. There’s a warm pink glow to her cheeks and a bright smile, but it’s the eyes that surprise Ginny the most. They’re clear, unadorned by the dark shadows that she’s grown so accustomed to seeing.

She thinks back to the journey that brought them both here, of all the trials they both had to endure. Maybe it was time that something finally went right, maybe it’s time for her to let go of the weight she’s been carrying around for years.

She takes one more look at her reflection. It’s a change, a jarring one, but one that she is eager to accept. When she slides into the shower, it is with a new lightness to her step.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
“You were out late last night,” her Mum says instead of a greeting when she gets down to the kitchen less than an hour later.

She freezes, a totally unfounded terror seizing her at the possibility that her unexpected sleepover was noticed, but she decides to play it cool. When in doubt, feign ignorance. “Huh? Oh yeah, I was working late. I think I’ve almost got it solved.”

“Honestly, Ginny,” she says spinning around, “you shouldn’t be out alone that late. I know times are different, but it’s just not safe.”

The lecture continues on, but she doesn’t need to listen to know the gist, she’s heard it so many times at this point that she could probably recite it from memory. Blatantly, she wishes she had just stayed in bed with Harry, consequences be damned.

“I wasn’t alone,” she starts to respond without thinking. Her Mum’s skeptical look forces her to continue despite her better judgment, “Harry was with me.”

“The entire time? He was with you? Actually, beside you?”

She wills herself not to blush. This is exactly what she didn’t want to get into. Not trusting her voice to not give anything away, she nods in confirmation instead.

Her Mum hums in quiet disapproval for a moment long, “okay then. You still shouldn’t be working that late, but as long as you’re not alone, there’s nothing I can say. And Harry’s a good boy too. You’ll be safe with him around.”

Ginny wonders if her Mum would feel the same way if she knew what her dear Harry was up to with her a couple hours ago, but the reality is that she probably wouldn’t care much. Oh, she’d disapprove of their activities, but that would be overshadowed by pure joy at the thought of them together.

No, that’s not the issue at all. She’s sure that even Ron would quickly get over the idea of her being involved with his best mate when he saw how happy she was, but they would all eventually have questions. Questions about the how and then the where, but more importantly the when. Questions that she has absolutely no desire to answer. Or not answer.

Since she’s been back, she’s tried really hard not to lie to anyone. It was a necessary evil that turned into an easy habit back during her Hogwarts days, one that she has no desire to be reacquainted with. One she would be, she realizes with a start.

She has things about her life that she doesn’t want people to know, skeletons in her closet both metaphorically and literally. Things that would inevitably be unraveled if her and Harry’s relationship were to be examined too closely. And maybe she’d be willing to take that risk, maybe, but she knows for sure that Harry isn’t going to be.

It’s not just her secrets on the line, it’s his too, and after how well it went last time they talked about sharing, she’s not eager to broach the subject anytime soon.

No, it’s better this way. It will give them time to get to know each other again and then maybe when they are more comfortable, the idea of their shared past coming out won’t seem insurmountable.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
Surprisingly, the feeling of joy, the weightlessness of being happy, sticks with Ginny over the next couple of weeks even though she doesn’t see Harry nearly as much as she’d like. It only takes her a few days to realize that his schedule is much fuller than she would have ever thought. Really, the only time she sees him is during family gatherings, where it’s nearly impossible to find a quiet moment with no one's watching, or work.

As they move into February and the Quidditch season starts to ramp up, it becomes abundantly clear that he shouldn’t or rather can’t, work both jobs. Yet, he somehow manages. Moving between places and roles like it’s as easy as changing a hat. He doesn’t say anything, but she can just tell that when he first took this job, he expected it to be completed long before now.

Nearly five months in and there doesn’t seem to be an end anywhere in sight. Oh, she knows that whatever is hidden down here is close at hand, she can feel the darkness seeping out stronger with every barrier she falls, but each obstacle is infinitely more complex than the last. She’d probably be much more frustrated with the lack of progress if additional delays didn’t just mean more unrestricted access to Harry.

That silver lining turns gray, however when his exhaustion starts to show through the cracks. She tries to convince him to just leave her to figure out the mess on her own, despite the selfish part inside of her that rejects the very idea, but he adamantly refuses. It gets to the point where she willingly calls it a day earlier than maybe necessary, just so he’ll go home and get some rest.

Between the two jobs, his commitment to Teddy, who he sees a least a few times every week and her annoyingly present family, it’s hard for them to find time alone those first couple weeks. Still, they do their best to make every moment count. A quick kiss before someone rounds the corner, longer lunch breaks where they spend time learning about each other, sharing anecdotes about their crazy lives in the dark of the tunnel. And then, in the brief moments of time when neither of them are being pulled away, some sleepovers.

She makes it a habit to go back to Harry’s place with him whenever the opportunity arises, using the excuse of working late to appease her Mum. She doesn’t get to stay. In fact, she doesn’t allow herself to ever linger as long as she did that first night, determined not to let her happiness turn into complacency, knowing that it was only luck that saved her from being caught that time.

It's something, but it’s not enough, not nearly. She wants to be with him all the time, misses him more than she thought was possible. More than anything, she just wants a full 24 hours of interrupted time with him, time to comfortably fall asleep with him next to her and then wake up in the morning beside him, only to linger in bed till noon. 

The answer to her problem comes to her only a few short days later from her brother of all people. They, her, Harry and Ron are sitting in what has now become their booth when he invites her to come see the team play at the quick match that some company is putting on to promote the upcoming season.

She plays her part perfectly, oohing at the right moments and adding the necessary sarcastic commentary, as though she has no prior knowledge of the event, but all the while her mind is spinning.

Looking over at Harry discreetly, she sees a similar glimmer of hopeful excitement in his eyes. This could work. It’s not perfect by any means, she’d much rather not have her first real alone time with her boyfriend to include her brother, but at this point she’s learnt not to be picky. Plus, with that many players around, Ron is likely to be distracted if not all of the trip, at least most of it.

“Sounds great!” Ginny says before he’s even finished pitching the idea, perhaps a bit too keenly judging by his shocked expression and Harry’s amused grimace.

“Really?” Ron says skeptically, “Great? I don’t think you’ve ever thought something was _great_.”

“Oh come off it,” she says shoving him, “I like Quidditch, I’ve always liked it….”

“Plus, it gets me out of the house. And away from work for a bit!” she adds on before he can interrupt launching into a long winded, perhaps over dramatic account of all the issues she’s been encountering at work.

By the time she is through, Ron is so eager to get away from her that he’s totally forgotten about her misplaced enthusiasm. After he’s a safe distance away, claiming a need for alcohol to heal his brain, Harry leans over, breath tickling her ear and asks, amusement clear in his voice, “That’s your solution? Just unload on him until he’s so tired of you, he runs away?”

“Hey, it worked! And he doesn’t suspect a thing.” she says leaning closer to him, “it’s your fault anyways.”

“Is it now?”

“Yes,” she hums, “you’re far too distracting. You’re throwing me off my game.”  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
She only has to wait a few days until the promised trip arrives. Her parents were all for it, excited in a way that makes her think that maybe they aren’t so fond of having her around constantly either. The planning was simple, it took remarkably little subtle manipulating to ensure that her and Harry’s rooms are beside each other. Meaning that when the port key lands carrying the entire team and all their plus ones bright and early Monday morning, it makes perfect sense for her and Harry to wander off together.

They manage a few hours of enjoyable solitude, wrapped up together in her room, before they head down to the pitch, ready to watch the first match of the day with everyone. The game is fun and not just because she has Harry pressed up beside her in the crowded box. The enthusiasm of the crowd is palpable and they both quickly get wrapped up in the excitement.

By the time the two matches for the day are over though, she’s ready to be back in bed with Harry. Whether it’s just a result of the atmosphere surrounding them or because they are only hiding from one person instead of dozens, he’s much freer in his affection.

There’s nothing scandalous, her brother is still a few people down from them, but he puts his arm around her waist sometime during the first match and then it never moves away. It remains a warm and steadying presence on her hip throughout the first and most of the second, but as the finale game nears its end and Ron transitions from slightly tipsy to actually plastered, it gets more daring, sliding in between her pants and jersey to stroke the sliver of skin.

They return to the room, who’s she’s not exactly sure, a tangle of limbs and frantic kisses within moments of the snitch being caught.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
After a heated exchange that leaves her flushed and breathless, Ginny gets her wish; curling up close to him, she allows herself to drift off to sleep. When she opens her eyes again it’s dark and she can’t quite figure out what has woken her up, but then she feels his gaze on her.

“This is starting to become a habit, Harry,” she says with a laugh, turning her head to see him. He just shakes his head in bashful amusement casting wild shadows around the moon lit room.

“Come on,” he says offering his hand, “let's do something.”

She feels a grin cover her lips as the familiarity of that phrase sparks a long forgotten memory.

_“We should go out, do something,” he says casually playing with her fingers just as the sun starts to set._

_The casual intimacy is still a little hard to fathom given that she was ready to walk out that door, never to look back just a few short hours ago, but in some ways that just makes it even better. She never saw herself here, in this moment with this man, with any man._

_“Oh really,” she says turning herself to face him straight on, a grin on her lips, “getting tired of this bed?”_

_“The bed is great.” He pulls her closer to him and then kisses her soundly to emphasize his point. She laughs, a mixture of arousal and joy coursing through her as he trails his mouth down her jaw and across her neck. He pauses with his mouth beside her ear, “I just thought it would be nice to take you out.”_

_He pulls back so he’s hovering above waiting for a response. She blinks her eyes a couple times trying to clear the fog from her brain. It’s a very different proposition he’s asking of her, one that she’s not altogether comfortable with, but that doesn’t make it bad._

_“Not afraid to be seen in public with me?” she jokes, but there’s no hiding the insecurity behind the question._

_“Hey,” he says softly, imploringly, but still she doesn’t meet his eyes._

_He places his hand on the side of her face, cupping her jaw. Slowly, his thumb strokes a smoothing pattern back and forth as he waits for her to look at him fully. It’s only once she does that he continues. “You are the best thing that has happened to me in a long, long time, okay? I should be so lucky as to be seen with you.”_

_His declaration fills her with warmth. He saw her, saw her more honestly than anyone has in a long time and yet he’s still able to look at her like that. Part of her worries that it’s all a game, that he’s got some ulterior motive. He’s too good to be true, that’s what life has taught her, but when he takes her hand and leads her through the streets, telling her all the things he’s seen here, all the things that he would like to show her, she can’t help but thinking that maybe she could just be this lucky._

Up high in the sky, the clear starry heavens a wide open sea around her, Ginny can barely believe she could be this lucky. She leans back more firmly against Harry savouring his unique warmth in contrast to the cold night air.

They could have stolen two brooms, and really if the circumstances had been different, she would have insisted on it. There’s a kind of vulnerability in sharing a broom with someone that she has never been comfortable with, not even as a child. Despite it all, she feels safe. She feels free and happy and not quite like she’s ever felt before.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
They arrive to work the day after the trip together, hand in hand with matching grins on their faces. She had the foresight to tell her parents that the trip would last a day longer, which meant that she got to wake up beside him for the third morning in a row.

He cooked her breakfast, they drank their cups of coffee sitting beside each other and then when the sun started to rise high in the sky, they headed into work, conscious of the fact that they had already lost several days of progress.

She’s laughing at something Harry said as they walk towards the building so she doesn’t register the figure standing primly on the front steps until they are almost on top of him.

“Ginny Weasley?” he says looking down at his notes. “Harry Potter?” his eyes flick up to Harry’s forehead almost involuntarily.

“Yes,” Harry says stepping slightly in front of her, the relaxed posture from moments again completely gone.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises, immediately.”

“Why?” she asks forcefully, stepping forward out of Harry’s protective stance with a twinge of annoyance towards both of them.

“You’re not authorized to be here,” he responds, tone dispassionate and bored, the complete opposite of her.

“Since when?” Harry asks moving forward again, but this time stopping beside her.

“That’s all I can tell you, if you have questions please direct them to the Ministry.”

“That’s it?” she asks in astonishment, months of progress gone in a moment.

“Yes. You’re going to have to leave now.” The dismissal is clear in his voice and it sets her teeth on edge. She’s gearing up to argue when she feels Harry grab a firm hold on her arm and start directing her back to the Apperation point.

“What are you doing?” she asks once they are out of sight, pulling her arm away a little harshly.

“Stopping you from getting onto a fight,” he answers as calmly as ever.

“You can’t seriously be okay with this?”

“Of course not! But that guy clearly knew nothing.”

Taking a couple deep breaths to help calm the adrenaline coursing through her, Ginny can see the logic with his reasoning even if she’s still not thrilled with his domineering behaviour. She sends him a quick smile to show her regret for her snapping which he accepts with ease.

Without any more communication, they both Apparate away knowing through an unspoken agreement to head to the Ministry. As they walk up to the correct floor, she can feel the confidence growing within her. She’s Ginny Weasley and he’s Harry Potter, they are going to be able to get to the bottom of this.

That hope is quickly dashed however, as they are sent on a wild chase throughout the day, moving from one place to another only to be told that they were where they should have been three stops before. As they move from place to place, she feels the frustration mounting, until finally, she reaches her breaking point.

“Who actually holds the property now,” she asks the lady in front of her, trying desperately to find some small lead she can chase.

The lady just shakes her head at her, “that’s not information that I can just hand out. If it’s something you would be interested in knowing you can fill out these forms here and then wait 4-6 weeks to see if your inquiry was granted.”

She gives the information to them with a polite smile on her face, but Ginny can tell from the look in her eye that they aren’t getting anywhere with her. At least not without involving some sketchy practices. Harry, perhaps more optimistic than her or maybe just not as good at reading people, gives it one last shot, turning on his most charming grin. The one he says is a near replica of the one his godfather used to use to get them out of sticky situations.

When that shows no promise, she grabs Harry’s arm to pull him away before she is tempted to do something she shouldn’t.

“It would be the ministry right?” Harry says once they have made it back out into the Londen air, breaking her out of her destructive thoughts.

_Right,_ she thinks, _that makes sense_. She remembers the day the Aurors took hold of it distinctly, she wasn’t there, of course, no one was going to let some random 17 year old girl intrude on a highly classified investigation, but by that point she had gotten very good at finding out information she wanted even if it was stuff she wasn’t supposed to know. And she wanted this information, desperately. In a lot of ways her sanity hinged on it. 

When the investigation yielded no answers, it was a tipping point for her. The moment where everything became too much, the straw that broke the metaphorical camel’s back. She left the country days later convinced that everything she had been working to accomplish over the last year was pointless. That she really was just a little girl pretending to be something she wasn’t like Tom had told her all those years ago. 

The feeling of failure stuck with her for years, still haunts her sometimes if she’s honest. Now though, she can’t help but wonder if it was all a lie, if there had been someone pulling strings behind the scenes all along. Back then it was devastating when they found nothing, but she didn’t question it. Instead, she questioned herself. When the passage was revealed years later, she thought it was strange, but again she didn’t question it.

_Why has she never questioned it?_

She’d had assumed that it was just a lucky coincidence when she stumbled across the posting for the job, after all, what were the odds she would see it from all the way across the world, but she should have been questioning why the passage was only found now. And how was it found?

“How did you find this job?” she asks suddenly, the memory of Bill’s heated words coming back to her.

“I, uh, Bill showed me,” he says after a moment of hesitation, “he thought it looked like something I’d be interested in.”

“Do you know where he heard about it from?” she questions brushing right past the awkwardness of his answer, intent on her goal.

“No idea,” and then “any particular reason you want to know?”

“No,” she shakes her head too preoccupied with her thoughts to give him a more thorough answer. “I just realized that I don’t actually know who hired us.”

An audible exclamation shows his surprise at that revelation, but he doesn’t ask her the same question in return for which she is thankful. She is honestly not sure what she would tell him now. The how is simple enough, but at this point leaving out the why would feel dishonest. It’s supposed to be different between them this time, but still, she can feel like urge to keep her secrets carefully hidden, raging inside her.

“Don’t worry, we are going to figure this out,” he says, placing a comforting hand on her arm, perhaps sensing her inner turmoil.

She just hums in response. _Yeah, there’s a lot of things she needs to figure out._


	9. Chapter 9

She still hasn’t found a solution to their problem, or at least a legal solution, a few days later when Harry arrives for the patent Weasley Sunday lunch. One look at him, even from across the room and through a crowd of people, and she can tell that he hasn’t had any success either. The disappointment rushes through her, mixed with a growing sense of frustration, but she pushes it aside. Now, surrounded by her family is not the time to let her worries show, or her doubts.

At this point, nearly a month into their relationship, they have developed a system for being around each other without giving too much away, not that it was very hard. The reality is that there has been some element of deception to her relationship with Harry from the very start. More than anything, it’s familiar ground for the both of them.

The meal passes like normal which is to say that it’s loud and a little unhinged, but she’d expect nothing less. In fact, everything is perfect, exactly how she planned it to be. Until it’s not.

“How’s work going Ginny?” Fleur asks a while later when the after dinner conversation starts to lull. Throwing her head back against the couch, Ginny lets out a groan, loud in the quiet of the sitting room.

“Oh, no!” Ron cries unnecessarily dramatic, “now you’ve done it. We don’t need to hear this, really,I think I’m still recovering from the last time I listened to her complain. It was hours, _hours_ , I’m never getting back.”

Ignoring Ron completely, she lifts herself back into a reasonable position, “It’s not.”

“What?” Bill asks, looking alert for the first time in a while.

“Someone from the ministry shut us down,” Harry informs the group, sharing a quick significant look with Bill.

“But… why? Why would they do that? After months of work” her Mum asks confused.

“Someone obviously doesn’t want them to find whatever’s down there,” Percy says surprising everyone. “What? I do understand that there’s corruption in the Ministry, I’m just not as flippant about the term as you lot.”

Her Mum’s eyes go wide, the look of fear that used to be so common coming back with a vengeance. “If people don’t want you involved in this Ginny, then you have to listen to them. It’s not safe.”

A calming hand by her dad stops her pleas, but does nothing to remove the look. For the first time since she’s been back, Ginny prepares herself to lie straight to her Mum’s face. There’s a cost to it, but then again, there has always been a cost.

“I’m not going to do anything stupid, Mum, I promise.” Thankfully her Mum takes her promise easily, not any better at spotting a lie now than she was then. Bill, on the other hand, is not as easily fooled nowadays.

“Ginny,” he says warningly.

“What?” she asks, choosing to focus on the irritation coursing through her rather than the guilt, “we have been banned from the property. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to.”

He shakes his head like he knows that she’s full of shit, which to be honest he probably does, but he doesn’t push the topic. Like her, he absolutely doesn’t want to do anything to upset her Mum further.

The conversation moves on from there, but a heavy weight settles over the room that no one, not even little Fred with his illogical jokes, is able to lift it. Through it all though, Bill and Harry send each other fervent looks like they are in on a secret that no one, not even her, is privy to.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
“Hey,” Ginny calls out jogging to catch up with Harry, just over an hour later.

“Hey,” he says with a smile, turning to face her without hesitation, “I didn’t think that you were going to be able to get away.”

“Well, I’m resourceful like that,” she responds, taking a step closer. It’s easy to ignore any doubts she may have when she’s around him like this. Even though there is still a respectable distance between them, she can feel the electricity building. He can too if the fire in his eyes is any indicator.

“I never doubted you for a second,” he proclaims despite all evidence to the contrary. It has its desired effect, making her smile and shake her head at him in exasperation.“So I’ll, uh, see you at work tomorrow?” he half asks.

“Oh, really?” she asks, looking up at him surprised.

“Come on,” he says tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, a knowing grin, “like you were ever going to stop just because some ministry official told you to. Your act in there was hardly convincing.”

She smacks his shoulder lightly in outrage, but she can’t really disagree. Still, it’s not a joke and he needs to know it, “just because I don’t follow rules doesn’t mean you have to as well…”

He starts to object, but she talks over him. “Seriously Harry, if we didn’t already know, we do now. There’s something dangerous down there, something that someone really doesn’t want found. You don’t need to put yourself at risk like that... not again. You’ve done enough.”

“And you haven’t?” he questions.

She wants to argue, to tell him that there’s no comparison between what he did and what she did, but he doesn’t give her the opportunity.

“Look, as far as I’m concerned we are a team. We go into this together.”

A part of her wants to resist, even with the convincing look in his eyes, the one that looks dangerously like a word that she’s not even willing to think, let alone say. She doesn’t work like that, hasn’t for a long time, but before the fear and doubts can take hold, he is speaking again, grabbing her hand to pull her closer towards him. “After all, isn’t that kind of the whole point with this thing between us? That we don’t have to do things alone anymore?”

“It’s reckless. Probably a bad idea,” she warns trying to keep a straight face, but he’s already convinced her and he knows it. She should be stronger than this, but unfortunately when it comes to him, she often isn’t. 

“I’ll have you know, I’m great at recklessness.”

“Okay then,” she says with a sigh. Looking quickly over her shoulder to make sure no one is watching out the window, she reaches up to kiss him. The world is always simpler when her lips are pressed against his. She needs that simplicity for a moment. 

When she starts to move away conscious of the audience that could show up any moment, he wraps his arm around her waist pulling her back. She giggles against his mouth, a totally foreign, but not altogether unwelcome sound. He reluctantly pulls back after a second, knowing that she was wise in her attempt to not get too involved.

Still, he lingers in the front yard, hands tucked into his pockets as a reminder to keep his hands to himself.

“Tomorrow we get some answers,” she tells him gleefully, riding the high of his presence beside her, the promise of his unconditional support and the thought of finally getting some long awaited answers.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
She Apperates straight to Harry’s early the next morning telling her Mum that she’s going to spend the day helping the twins in the shop and then go and visit Bill, hoping that neither of them appear to contradict her story part way through the day. Unfortunately, it’s the best that she can do. She’s kept herself too isolated these last six months for her Mum to suddenly believe that she has friends to visit.

For a minute, just as she’s about to walk out the door, it seems like her Mum has seen through her, admittedly, faulty cover story, but then she just reminds her to have some lunch before turning back to her task. Sometimes, like now, Ginny can’t help but wonder how much of her Mum’s ignorance is nothing more than a choice she makes to protect herself.

Another pang of guilt washes over her with the thought of what she’s doing to her family by continuing to go down this path, but she pushes that away. She has a job to do. After all, if her hunch is right, there are other mothers out there still waiting on her, counting on her to find them some answers.

_The first indication that something, aside from the obvious chaos and destruction of course, is wrong comes right at the end of her fifth year; the marks which so many were hesitant about, proving their usefulness yet again. Ginny always expected them to be useful in high stakes situations, but it became so much more than that._

_They became a symbol of hope for the people. Someone, despite their best efforts they still don’t know who, adapted the technology so that a simple tap on their Rune engraved onto a card is all that’s necessary to call them, opening up their protection to anyone with a wand. Suddenly, their mark is everywhere. Their calling card passed between people with hushed whispers and implied promises. It’s everything Ginny hoped it would be._

_The cards became useful in other ways too. People start using them to pass information to the Order secretly, little tips or desperate pleas written out carefully and then adorned with their mark ready to summon them to it. It’s one of those heart wrenching appeals that she finds lying pinned under a rock, high up on the mountains a few weeks into June._

_There isn’t much to the note when she opens in back at the castle a few hours later, just a quick summary of the problem, the name of a girl missing, the last time she was seen, a general description. There’s no theorizing about where she might have gone like Ginny’s come to expect in letters like this, but there is still a clear implication that whoever wrote this believes she was taken. It would almost seem impassive, emotionless, but there’s shakiness to the hand writing and a few very apparent wet marks which tell her the writer of this letter was anything but indifferent._

_She wonders absently who it was that sent out the request, a parent stricken with the loss of their child, a brother determined to help his sister despite the very real danger or maybe a lover, someone who expected her to come home and then grow old with them. Whenever she gets cases like this, she tries to take the time to picture the life the person could have. It helps to make them feel real, to ground what it is she does in something tangible. Too often, she’s finding that people are becoming hollow, like chess pieces moving around a board rather than real people with actual feelings moving through life._

_It’s a balance that she’s struggling to find as the war gains momentum. While the increased visibility of Order is great, it means that more and more she is required to go out there and make tough calls, ones that she’s not sure she has the right to be making. And then every time she does, it takes a little piece from her, adds another weight to her shoulders and deepens the shadows behind her eyes._

_She wants to save people, to help them, but doesn’t want to lose her humanity in the process. Of course, she doesn’t say that, not that there would be anyone to say it to even if she felt so inclined. While the group might have started off as a bunch of lone wolves with a common goal, it’s turned out to be much more isolating._

_Almost every day now there’s a new disagreement over how they should be conducting themselves. Some people believe that they need to start engaging the opposition. They argue that it’s ridiculous to keep cleaning up messes when they could just take down the problem in the first place. But that leads to the question of who’s the enemy which no one can agree on. The idea of no allegiance but to the common good is great in theory, but in practice, as lines are drawn more firmly every day between sides, it’s much harder._

_Sometimes, she thinks about leaving, about quietly slipping back into the shadows of obscurity where she was supposed to stay, but then a case like this falls into her lap and she’s reminded of how important what they do is._

_With new resolve, Ginny heads to their headquarters the next day knowing that whatever issuers might be between them, a young girl, seemingly insignificant by all means disappearing out of nowhere, is exactly who this organization was designed to help._

_She asks around hoping that someone will have some information to give her a starting point, but no one has much of anything. She spends most of her History of Magic exam thinking about who she could question and where she could go to start the process._

_Unfortunately, her hopes of getting answers quickly are crushed by the end of term and the train ride home. Transitioning to the close confines of the Burrow and the watchful eye of her mother is always hard after the freedom of Hogwarts, but this year it’s particularly suffocating. With every day that passes her frustration grows, angry at her inability to do anything to help the people calling out to her, but also angry at her family for being able to sit back and do nothing. More often than not, she’ll be forced to sit through dinner, a smile on her face as her hip burns a constant reminder of the people that need her._

_The discontentment only increases as the summer passes. She continues to show up, to act the part of the dutiful daughter, but she retreats further and further inside herself. It’s a coping method, she tells her, a way for her to separate her life with her family and her life with the Order, but even as it happens it feels dangerous. Another layer of herself falling away._

_This missing girl is never far from her thoughts, in fact she consumes most of them. She’ll be talking with her Mum or playing chess with Ron, but really thinking about the best way to find her. In the few instances she’s managed to get out, she’s able to piece together how she was taken, but the why remains a mystery. A mystery that she’s determined to solve._

_Her fellow members don’t share her enthusiasm once she’s returned to Hogwarts. They tell her that she’s wasting her time, that there are so many other people to focus on, ones who she actually has a chance of saving. For a minute, she almost gives up, but then another letter is delivered describing almost the same circumstances and her resolve is strengthened._

_As the months pass and half a dozen more cases like it appear that resolve starts to turn into an obsession. She essentially stops attending class, doing the bare minimum to not attract attention. She needs to find them. There’s something about this, something about these girls that tells her that they are still alive, just out there waiting for her to bring them home._   


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
Almost as if someone out there knows that they are running out of time, Ginny is able to make quick work of the remaining barriers. Or maybe her and Harry are just more focused on the task in front of them than they have been in weeks. There’s an urgency to both of their movements, the feeling of dark magic permeates the air stronger than ever before. She can feel it tingling on the back of her neck, making the hairs on her arms stand on end. There’s no idle chatter, Harry remains standing vigilantly behind her with his wand out. She doesn’t stop until the last illusions fall and a large stone door is revealed.

If they were different people, maybe there would be some hesitance, a last goodbye in case opening that door triggers a series of unfortunate events, but they are not. Instead of saying anything, they share one last look and then Ginny adjusts her wand in her hand and steps forward.

A puff of dust is the first thing that registers when the door finally finishes opening. She does a final check for traps, but the coast is clear. _No one ever expected anyone to get this far_ , she can’t help but think triumphantly.

With a swish of her wand that torches lining the walls light, illuminating the small space. There’s not much to it. Stone walls and a dirt floor, almost as if it was a natural cavern that someone converted to fit their nefarious purposes. But even if she can’t see anything, she can feel it. There’s a hum so strong that it almost feels like a ringing in her ears.

She steps into the room slowly, Harry right behind her. For a second, she’s tempted to tell him to stay back, but she resists the urge. With the answers so temptingly close, she can’t be bothered to argue. Instead, she walks to the closest wall, searching with both her eyes and her wand for something out of the ordinary.

“Ginny,” Harry calls out to her softly to gain her attention a while later. She turns to see him standing at the opposite wall, the one furthest into the room, “look at this.”

He waves his wand muttering a nearly silent incarnation that she can’t make out. Slowly, a goblet covered in runes resting on a pedestal slides towards them. She feels her stomach drop at the sight of a dark rusty substance, long dried, coating the interior. It’s all of her worst fears coming true, the dark thoughts that she’d have late at night when hopelessness prevailed coming to fruition.

“What do you think?” Harry starts to ask her but her attention is drawn to a book displayed behind the cup.

She reaches out to grab it, confident for no other reason than her familiarity with this case, that it’s not going to hurt her. Her suspicions are proven correct, there is no magic within the book, but that doesn’t stop a wave of disgust to wash over her when her hand makes contact. 

Harry is most definitely yelling at her, telling her to be cautious, but she can’t hear him through the ringing in her ears. She’s consumed with a singular razor sharp focus. Her hand trembles as she flips the cover over, but she doesn’t let that stop her.

Inside is a list of names, all in the same script, carefully arranged in rows with dates meticulously marked on this side; dates of bondage and dates of birth. There are so many, she thinks frantically turning the pages, so many more than she thought there would be. She recognizes a few names, girls she spent hours and hours thinking about, but there are dozens more, all with their names connected to one of a few male names repeated throughout the book. And then underneath, a list of heirs.

She feels like she’s going to be sick, like the ground is shaking beneath her. More than anything, she wants to run away, to hide from the truth. She slaps the books shut, unable to see the horrifying evidence written out like clinical data in front of her anymore.

Squeezing her eyes shut, trying to block the names that she can’t seem to stop seeing, Ginny finally lets Harry take the book. She can feel the confusion radiating off him and then the horror, but she doesn’t open her eyes. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t speak.

“What?” he says faintly, like he can’t quite believe that people could be this cruel. She opens her eyes, some sick and twisted part of her needing to the moment the truth lands. “They were taking these women.. these girls and… and…”

“And breeding them,” she finishes for him, voice cold and detached.

He looks up at her and their eyes finally met, soft green meeting cold brown, but she looks away quickly, another wave of guilt washing over her. She could have saved them. She should have saved them. She doesn’t deserve to find comfort in him.

By silent agreement, they both start to make their way out of the room and back through the tunnel, their heavy footsteps loud and ominous echoing across the space in a way that they never were before.

In the far recesses of her mind, she knows that leaving is a mistake, a new one in the long line she’s made regarding this case. There’s an inescapable reality that there are more answers to be found down there, more information to be gained which would undoubtedly make her next steps easier, but she can’t think about that now. She doesn’t want to think right now.

It’s easier to embrace the blackness colouring the edge of her vision, to focus on the pit of lead rolling around in her stomach. Just keep moving. One foot in front of the other, follow Harry. Remember to breathe.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
“What are we going to do?” Harry finally asks the question that needs to be asked once they’ve returned to the relative safety of his apartment.

“I’m going to find them,” she responds, a fierce determination rising up within her. As the names continued to flash behind her eyes, she realized something. While there were several names crossed out, too many of the children for her brain to process, there’s also many that weren't. There were entries as recent as 3 years ago. They could still be alive. Some way, somehow, she is going to find them. Find them and bring them home safe, even if it’s the last thing she does.

Harry sends her an annoyed glance, “obviously, but how? I don’t know about you, but five years ago I wasn’t exactly focused on the inner politics of deatheathers... I had other priorities…. now I wouldn’t even know where to start looking ... we need to bring someone else in—”

“No, absolutely not,” she cuts him off before he can even finish his thought.

“I’m not suggesting that we go waltzing into the Auror department,” he responds quickly, affronted, “just a small group of people who we trust to help.”

“No one,” she repeats sternly, “I work alone.”

“Really?” he says, exaggeratedly gesturing between the two of them, “could have fooled me.”

There’s an edge to his tone, a dark mocking one that she hasn’t seen since right after her return. She doesn’t like it one bit.

“Since when are you all eager to work with others?” she responds rhetorically instead, “last I checked you were as against it as anyone.” She may not know everything about his past, but it’s clear to her that he went into that final confrontation with Tom alone by choice as much as circumstance.

“Don’t you think they deserve better than that?” he asks heatedly, ignoring the validity of her statement altogether, “better than the two of us floundering our way to an answer? Haven’t they waited long enough!?”

“Don’t you dare accuse me of not caring enough!”

They stare at each other glaring, both breathing heavily for no other reason than the emotion and aggression they are trying to contain. It all feels remarkably familiar and not in a good way. Eventually, he steps back with a curse turning away. That feels familiar too.

She takes a few deep breaths to try and temper her frustration while his back is to her. He’s not the enemy, she reminds herself, but that’s hard to believe when everyone and everything feels like an obstacle right now.

“That’s not what I’m saying… or at least not what I was trying to say,” he says more calmly, moving to face her once again. This time though, he keeps some distance between them, for which she’s thankful. The few minutes gave her back some control, but she still feels like she’s standing on the edge of a cliff.

“I know you care,” he continues, the warmth she’s come to expect back in his voice, “but we need more expertise, we need some people with actual knowledge to help us, not a lot, just a few… maybe Bill?”

“No.” Ginny says sternly, “We are not involving my family in any of this.”

“Oh so now they’re _your_ family,” he responds bitterly, “right because my family ended up dead because of their involvement with me.”

She sighs, _how did this get so far off track?_ “I didn’t mean it like that. I know they are important to you too, but you weren’t around during the war years, you didn’t see how it all threatened to tear them apart… I won’t, I can’t be the one responsible for sending them back to that place.”

He nods his head slightly whether in acceptance of her half-assed apology or in agreement with her call. Either way, they both decide to drop the subject. 

In the end, they decide to do nothing, or at least nothing of substance. They go back the next day and carefully scrub any trace of their latest visit, but Ginny can’t help feeling that it’s all too late, not that she tells Harry that. The reality is that if someone was worried, they would have been monitoring the site and would have seen them go in. The target is already on their backs, all she can do now is try and limit the damage.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
In the aftermath, an uneasy tension settles over them. One that after a few days of sitting in her frustration and anger, she desperately wants gone. Leaving a quick note for her Mum using another one of her brothers as an excuse, she slips out of bed early a few mornings later and heads over to Harry’s, determined to fix what’s broken between them.

Using the key that he gave her not a week into their relationship, she sneaks into his apartment. She navigates the familiar space using only the faint morning light until she’s right beside the bed. She pauses for a moment to watch him sleep. As much as she likes to tease him, she can see the appeal. He almost looks like a different person lying there peacefully, unbothered by the weight of the world.

She pulls her shoes off and carefully slides into the bed across from him. She wants this to work, really wants it to; maybe even needs it to. It’s not a startlingly realization, if she’s honest with herself, she knew this was where she’d end up the moment she allowed Harry to gain a morsel of her interest, but it’s still unsettling all the same.

An adjective that can be used to describe almost all elements of her life right now. Unbidden to her, visions of her latest nightmare flash across her mind. Girls, now young women, with gaunt cheeks and matted hair holding on tightly to crying children, trying desperately to calm them. The room they are crowded into is dark, still there’s no hiding the deadness behind their eyes as they slowly rock the child back and forth staring straight at her, judging her, condemning her.

She squeezes her eyes shut trying to block out the images. She takes a deep breath, forcibly telling herself that it was a dream. That does little to halt her growing panic, however, when she knows that her dreams have been their reality for years. She doesn’t realize that she’s grabbed tightly into Harry’s hand, waking him up, until he starts to stroke his thumb across the back of her hand.

“Hi,” he says grinning up at her like he didn’t just wake up to find her verging on a panic attack in his room.

“Hi,” she responds, letting out a shaky breath. She starts to loosen her hand from his grip, but he locks their hands more firmly together. Looking down at their hands, she finds a little bit of peace inside her despite the circumstances. This she can fix, she knows she can.

Almost as if he can read her mind, Harry starts to speak. “I know the last few days have been rough, for obvious reasons, but I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Yeah?” she questions, needing the reassurance that she did the right thing, now more than ever.

“Of course, it’s always better walking up with you beside me.”

She can’t think of anything to say to that which doesn’t sound embarrassingly mushy so she leans down to kiss him instead, trying to infuse every single thing she wants to say to him in that action alone.

They lay in bed for a while just enjoying each other’s company, until she gets an idea in her head, one that she can’t seem to let go of. One that she’s not sure she even wants to.

“Why don’t we go out? Get some food? Just spend the day walking around Muggle London.” She knows that there are other things that need her attention, old demons that she’s going to have to face head on sooner than later, but more than anything she needs this. Just one day where she can pretend to be a normal 23 year old girl enjoying a day with her boyfriend; one day where the responsibility and weight don’t exist.

“Sounds brilliant!” Harry says with more enthusiasm than she’s seen for him in a while.

Soon they are out of the house and walking through the streets hand in hand without a care in the world. They stop at a food cart to get some lunch and then she takes him to her favourite Muggle ice cream shop. All in all, it's a perfect day, exactly the one she wanted which should have told her that something was amiss. Things just aren’t that good.

They are standing on a nearly empty street corner having wandered far from the heart of the city. The late March sun is warm on her back, Harry is caught up telling her a story about Teddy’s latest antic when she sees something out of the corner of her eye. A figure lurking just at the edge of one of the buildings.

There’s nothing inherently suspicious about them, it’s a rougher neighborhood, by all accounts it should be considered normal, but her instincts tell her it’s not.

It happens within seconds, one moment she’s still looking across the way confused, half listening to Harry, then there’s a flash of light and all she can do is react.

She steps around Harry, doing her best to push him out of the line of fire, all the while knowing it’s hopeless. There’s no time.

She’s barely got her wand in her hand when the spell hits.

There’s a sharp burst of pain along her side.

Faintly, she hears Harry’s panicked voice calling out to her.

And then everything fades to black.


	10. Chapter 10

Ginny wakes with a start, sitting bolt upright, head whipping back and forth trying to figure out what happened. There’s nothing about the room to give her any clues, white walls, white floors and a bright light overhead that makes her head pound. She closes her eyes with a wince. She’s sitting on a hard bed, the sheets cool and crisp beneath her fingertips. There’s an odd odor to the air or maybe it’s that the problem, an overall lack of smells.

She shakes her head to try and clear it, to try and stop the ringing in her ears, but that just makes everything worse. There’s a big blank spot where her memories should be, a gaping hole between then and now. The last thing she remembers is being out in Muggle London, going to get some food, maybe, and then turning to talk to someone. There’s a hazy figure and disjointed words and then a flash of bright light.

“Harry,” she says, opening her eyes wide despite the pain. She starts to push herself out of bed, refusing to allow the stiffness in her limbs to slow her down,until a gentle hand on her arm draws her attention. Suddenly, her ears clear and sound comes rushing back in.

“He’s fine, dear,” her Mum says with a knowing twinkle in her eye that doesn’t fit with the circumstances in the slightest. “I mean, he’s worried about you… we all are. You gave us quite a scare, but you’re going to be fine.”

There’s a stubborn set to her shoulders and a forced cheeriness to her voice as she continues, “He just went to get some food with your brother, poor boy hasn’t moved from the waiting room in hours. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone that frantic, the pacing! It would have been a dead give away even if he hadn’t told—”

She cuts off suddenly with a startled gasp. Ginny twists around to face her Mum better, trying to figure out what’s wrong and that’s when she feels it, the faint brush of cold air across her bare back exposed to the world by the loose tie of her hospital gown.

“Ginny,” her Mum says shakily, horror coating her tone. She slowly stretches her hand out to touch one of the scars as if needing to feel it to believe that it’s real, but Ginny doesn’t let her get that close. She springs out of bed quickly, all soreness forgotten, backing away from her Mum and turning so that she won’t be able to see the disfigurations anymore.

“It’s fine, Mum,” she says trying to keep her voice firm and impassive, but there’s no hiding the tremor. Careful planning, strategic showering and regimented glamour casting had delayed this moment so long that she had almost stopped fearing it coming.

“What…? What happened?” her Mum asks forcefully despite the stutter. “When did tho-- those happen?”

All she can do is shake her head, a blatant refusal to acknowledge what is happening in front of her. Yet even as she does, the memory pushes into the front of her mind.

_The wind rips around her, the rain splashing relentlessly against her face as she looks around frantically trying to make sense of the scene in front of her. She pulls her hood down further trying to keep her vision clear if only for a moment._

_It’s cold. It’s wet. It’s chaos._

_In the last two years she has been in her fair share of battles, seen a lot of things that she never thought she would, but never anything like this. Where a town once stood is now just a mess of rubble, buildings are on fire despite the rain and large craters line the streets._

_Whereas in the past there’s been some restraint, some sense of decorum, now there is none. The Death Eaters show no control as they shoot off spells of death and destruction like they have nothing to lose while their opposition continue to use third year defensive tactics._

_All around people run desperate to find shelter. So many people, running. She sees the tell tale swish of black robes fading in and out of the smog, the bold red of her fellow order members, the brown of Ministry Aurors, intermixed with faces she knows belong to the Order of the Phoenix, all blurring together to create one distorted picture. It’s nearly impossible to tell who is who, how many on each side there are. How many civilians there were, how many casualties there have been._

_She’s too late. A wave of guilt surges up within her. She ignored the calling as had been her habit of late, choosing to focus on her mission of finding the girls. Prioritizing then, their wellbeing over anyone else’s. It was only once the burning escalated to the point of pain that her attention was diverted from the research in front of her._

_Yet even as the guilt and regret threaten to consume her, she relentlessly pushes it down. Guilt doesn’t do anything to help the people still trapped down there. She can’t be too late, it’s unacceptable._

_With one last appraisal of the fight, she moves in, sliding into the fighting with a cold hard determination. Carefully, she makes her way into the heart of the fighting, sticking to the edges of half crumpled buildings and the rubble induced shadows. At every opportunity, she shots off a stunner, taking out death eaters and other fighters alike without hesitation. The time for passivity is over, it has been for a long time. There are too many players in this game, some need to be eliminated to save the many._

_For a long time she fought it, the idea that there was not one singular enemy, that anyone fighting was an enemy to peace no matter what side they’re on, but now, surrounded by the chaos of too many conflicts, she knows that they were right. All around her, there are people who are too focused on fighting each other to notice the growing number of bodies piling up beneath them._

_Sure enough, it’s not the people fighting who spot her signature cloak first, it’s the people huddled together under a half collapsed building. One of them, a child who can’t be more than ten, sees her first and then cries out in joy. When she looks over the small boy is tugging on the adults sleeve and pointing to her with hope filled eyes._

_It takes them a moment, but once her signature cloak is spotted, she feels the weight of a dozen eyes land on her and then half as many spells. Her shield does its job and stops them, but she can’t help mourning the anonymity she lost._

_From there it’s nothing, but muscle memory. Shot, block, move, repeat. Her mind turns off and her instincts take over. When a particularly vigorous blasting hex forces her to roll out of the way, she is forced to watch as the rickety building collapses in on itself. They are a regrettable loss, but right now her safety has to take priority. She can’t help anyone if she’s dead._

_Grief and regret have no place in battle. Anger though, that’s a useful tool. She uses it now to light the fire of rage hotter underneath her skin. It’s such a useless waste of life. When she goes on the offensive again, she isn’t using stunners._

_For a while, she duels evenly with the masked men in front of her, but eventually she gains too much attention and is left with no option other than to backtrack. She slides back into the shadows, using the back alleys of the small town to avoid the major fighting._

_As she walks, she encounters few people. The ones she finds huddled and scared she pauses to hastily direct them away from the conflict. For everyone else, she sends off a swift stunner. Those wearing a white mask get their wands sapped too. She’s sick of playing this game._

_She continues on in this manner for a while until she stops just short of entering a passageway hearing voices._

_"Come on Jacob, just do it already!”_

_“He’s not going to, the Dark Lord should have his head.”_

_“Just give him a minute! Right, Coby, you’re going to do it?”_

_Beneath the three distinctly male voices, she can hear faint whimpering, the sound of someone clearly afraid for their imminent safety. She slowly peeks her head around the corner, knowing that as much her humanity may be telling her to rush in and play the hero, everyone will be much better off if she stops and makes a plan first._

_She sees four men, three standing in a group together and then one off to the side with their wand pointed shakily at the victim, a middle aged man with blood dripping from a gash in his forehead. What she thought was a passage through to the next street is actually a dead end._

_It’s only with another sweep and a closer look, some of the fog shifting away, she realizes that they aren’t men at all. Boys is a more apt description. They are likely younger than her, if not her age, probably Hogwarts students. She looks closer, trying to identify them, the idiots took off their masks, but it’s no use. They are too far away, the air is too cloudy. Still, she reminders herself not to underestimate them._

_“We need to hurry up! Do it or I will.”_

_The largest figure of the group steps further forward, clearly intending to take the place in front of the man, but before he can push his way through, the trembling boy finally finds his voice. “No, I’ll do it.”_

_He strengthens his grip on his wand, holding firmly, but still, nothing happens. She can sense the mounting frustration within the group, she needs to move soon, but there’s a morbid fascination with the dynamics playing out in front of her that makes her hesitate. Logically, she knows that there are people among the Deatheater ranks that don’t believe in the case, just as there are people who stand on the sidelines wishing they could be different, but she’s never seen someone forced to make that choice so blatantly before._

_Honestly, she wants to see if he’s got the hate to do it and if he doesn’t, well, it’s better for him to realize that now than later. There is only so much successful pretending a person can do before they start to lose themselves and she’d rather he save himself from that fate if she can before she interjects._

_“That’s it, I’ve had enough.”_

_She barely has a second to react, so caught up in her thoughts. As it is, she’s only able to misdirect the blasting hex, sending it towards the man, not stopping it entirely. Instead of the intended target the spell makes contact with the side of the building, sending the man flying through the air and a load of bricks falling to the ground. The resounding bang sends a wave of dust through the air which she quickly takes advantage of, moving to disarm and stun the instigator before he even really registers her presence._

_After that it’s easy to take down the other two with a couple flicks of her wrist. It was as she expected, they lack the training of true Deatheaters, using nothing more than their number to intimidate. She turns to eliminate the final threat, her movements nothing more than a rehearsed dance at this point, but the fear reflected back at her stops her movements short._

_Despite the very real danger she knows she poses to many people, she’s never had someone look at her quite like that._

_"Please don’t hurt me!” he exclaims from his position crouched on the ground, raising his arms protectively over his head and dropping his wand._

_She feels a twinge of sympathy in spite of herself. He’s just a kid caught up in something with no way out. She understands that more than she’d like to admit. She studies him for a moment longer and then makes a call. Hoping desperately that her instincts aren’t wrong, she purposefully turns her back on him and walks over to check on the unconscious man._

_Once she is satisfied that he’s stable, she moves to the bodies of the fallen Deatheaters, picking up their wands one by one and snapping them. It doesn’t matter that they are young, that they are probably her classmates. She doesn’t look. They were willing to hurt someone innocent today and at this point, that’s enough for her to judge them guilty._

_It’s only once the last one is broken into a bunch of tiny pieces that she turns to look back at him. He’s watching her warily, confusion written all over his face. She just doesn’t get it, doesn’t get him. “What are you doing? Why are you here?”_

_“I don’t have a choice,” he answers quietly._

_“Everyone has a choice,” she responds sternly, her sympathy turning to frustration, “and you better be damn sure you can live with the one you make.”_

_He doesn’t say anything else, scurrying away after a moment just long enough that she starts to think maybe she got through to him. She doesn’t allow herself to watch him disappear, instead she turns back to the fighting, but from that point forward she’s distracted. There’s a missing beat to her dance, a faulty step. Despite her best efforts, she keeps seeing his sorrow filled eyes begging her to save him, to give him an easy way out._

_There are a few close calls that she’s able to correct at the last moment, but the urgency of the fight doesn’t do anything to help her. Her head isn’t in the game. She should leave, get out while she still can, but she doesn’t. At least, not until she’s forced too._

_She’s in one of the many stores that used to line the street, holding her own against one of the more competent Deatheaters when her control over the situation starts to slip. Looking behind her, her opponent lets out an eerie chuckle behind their mask, before turning towards the back exit. She only has a second to wonder what changed before a loud boom rocks the entire room._

_Quickly, she ducks for cover, but it’s too late. All around her potion bottles are bursting, the heat from the explosion shattering the fragile glass and sending acidic droplets raining down on her. She pulls her cloak more firmly around her, hoping that the protective properties of the cloth are enough to save her._

_They are not._

_She keeps her head down as she tries to escape the rapidly falling structure, allowing her back to take the brunt of the damage. By the time she makes it outside, all she can do is cast a quick numbing charm and then keep moving, sure that if she stops for even a moment, she won’t get up again._

_As she makes her way back towards a safe Aperition point, she lets the frustration and anger fuel her. She should have seen that coming. If she had been paying attention she would have, but because she got distracted, because she let her emotions take precedent, she didn’t. Now she’s hurt, but more important than that, how many innocent people were hurt because she didn’t act._

_She was foolish, allowing the plight of some random boy to pull her focus and foolishness has no place here, not when the line between life and death is so easily crossed. It’s a mistake she won’t make again, she promises herself when she finally makes it back to safety and is free to let darkness take over._

_When she wakes up a few hours later, she’s back at headquarters. There’s no one standing over her worrying for which she is thankful. There’s a sharp twinge in her side when she moves to sit up, but she doesn’t let that slow her. In fact, she can barely feel it through the frustration coursing through her, through the anger. She moves towards the full length mirrors lining the opposite wall and then lifts her shirt._

_A grim satisfaction overtakes her as she observes the burn marks scattered across her shoulder blades. They will scar. They will mark her skin forever, a constant reminder of the cost of compassion and the danger of letting people too close._

For years, her scars have served their purpose, reminding her of a different time. Even now, she doesn’t mind them, what they symbolize. They are a part of her past, but a part that she’s not willing to share. That she can’t share. She shakes her head in rejection of the invasive questions, but with every dismissal, her Mum’s relentlessness seems to grow. The ignorance is gone, replaced by a fervent need for answers. Answers which she isn’t willing to give.

Perhaps sensing the futility of her approach, her Mum pushes herself out of her chair and starts moving towards her. Just as quickly, Ginny scurries back. Her Mum doesn’t get it, she won’t be able to, not without years and years of explanations which go all the way back to why she was withdrawn the summer after her first year. 

“Oof,” she hears as she slams back into someone. She turns her head slightly, one eye still on her Mum’s approaching form, to see Ron, a bag of food clenched tightly in his hand.  
“Oh, good, you’re awake. Took you long enough,” he teases with a strained smile. “See I told you there was nothing to worry about.”

He continues on, talking to someone she can’t see. Her father slides around him, stopping to kiss her on the head, before going to stand beside her mother. There’s more voices, more shuffling as people push themselves into the room, but she can’t focus on any of that. The flimsy backing of her gown and the possibility of all her secrets being outed, her only thought.

She flicks her wrist intending to silently cast the charm, but nothing happens. She looks down at her bare arm, there’s no wand. _There’s no wand._

“Where’s my wand?” she asks, aiming for annoyed indifference and failing miserably. Her heart is pounding in her chest. She needs her wand.

Her eyes dart around the room. There’s too many people, too many variables. Any way she turns there’s someone facing her back. She can’t focus. Her head is spinning, her eyes are stinging, her legs holding her up feel remarkably weak.

She moves to the closest wall and leans against it hoping that everyone will just assume that she needs the extra support. It’s not far from the truth. The panic that has been building and building over the last couple of days takes over. There’s no pushing it down, no controlling it.

Frantically, she tries to breathe, telling herself sternly that she’s not going to have her first panic attack in years in front of nearly her entire family, but it’s not working. Nothing is working.

And then she sees him, standing awkwardly just behind Ron with his hands tucked in his pockets, and the next breath comes slightly easier. She looks at him, right into his eyes and lets the familiarity ground her. For a second, their eyes connect and everything seems like it’s going to be okay.

She knows that he will be able to see the unadulterated fear in her eyes, but she can’t bring herself to care. He’s seen so many of her broken pieces and never looked away. She can trust him with this. Seconds seem like minutes as they look at each other, having a conversation that no one else can hear.

Then in a blink of an eye the comfort is gone. A shadow passes over him. For a fraction of a second, she can see the torment that she thought was long gone and then he looks away, retreating into the background with no one the wiser.

It’s the last straw. She slides to the ground, resting her head on her knees. _It’s fine, it’s fine, you’re fine_ she chants to herself as if she can forcibly will the panic raging inside her away. She can hear someone coming closer, but she just buries her face further into the fabric of her gown. She presses her nails into her hand hoping that the pain will ground her.

A gentle hand rests against her arm and she flinches back in spite of herself. She knows it’s not him, the magic is all wrong, but she still looks up hoping. Instead of messy black hair, she sees long red. All things considered, he’s probably a much better alternative.

Hastily, she wipes at her eyes, but her hand comes away dry. “Get me out of here,” she pleads quietly.

He looks over his shoulder quickly, at who she doesn’t know, and then grabs more firmly onto her arm. For once, the feeling of Apperation feels like breathing instead of suffocation.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
Somehow, Ginny manages to keep her feet under her when they land, but just barely. Really, it’s all thanks to the hold that Bill still has on her arm. She sends him a quick nod in thanks, both for keeping her upright and for getting her out of there, but that thanks quickly turns into a scowl when she realizes just where he’s taken them. Once that slight bit of annoyance passes through her, it’s easy to grab hold of, to use it to push away the feeling of utter helplessness. Or at least push it down.

“You know, when I said get me out of there, I didn’t mean take me here,” she remarks bitterly, pulling her arm away. She looks around the living room of the Burrow, the familiar pictures on the wall, the blanket thrown casually over the back of the couch that was knitted some time before she was born, but none of the comforting feelings of home wash over her.

“How did we get in here?” she asks, realizing they did the seemingly impossible by Apperating straight here and choosing to focus on that instead.

“Ginny...” he sighs.

“What? It’s a valid question,” she snaps back.

“Who do you think created these wards?” he asks rhetorically, but he continues on, perhaps deciding that it’s best to humor her, “I added in a loophole to allow my signature to Apperate in and out, seemed useful. Now, what happened?”

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” she questions, partly to avoid the topic, but also because she _still_ can’t figure out what happened.

He glares at her for a moment, sizing her up, trying to decide if it’s the right moment to push. Evidently, he must decide that she looks too broken because he starts to explain. “You were out with Harry, on some kind of a date...”

“Yes, I remember that part,” she says dismissively waving her hand. Even though it is exactly what she wanted, she’s annoyed at the idea that he’s looking at her and seeing something fragile.

“Any comment to make on that?”

He obviously wants some details about her and Harry, well sucks to be him. She’d like some answers too and it doesn’t look like she’ll be getting them anytime soon. “No.”

Shaking his head, Bill eyes her with exasperation, but keeps going, “I don’t really know what happened… he wasn’t exactly making the most sense— all I know is a protronous shows up saying you’d been hurt and then I get there and he’s rambling on about you blocking him and how you just collapsed. Somehow you must have seen the attacker aiming at him and then moved to engage.”

She nods, that description lines up with the hazy memories floating around in her mind. “Did he manage to stop the attacker?”

“No,” he shakes his head with a grimace, “and from what it sounds like there was more than one.”

More than one! She struggles not to let the surprise show on her face. _How in the world did they both manage to miss that? How did she manage to miss that?_

“From what it sounds like everything turned to chaos after you went down. He managed to get a shield up before he was hit, but there was no way to go on the offensive and stay with you. Obviously, he chose to stay with you.”

She’s barely able to suppress a groan, _of course he did, what an idiot._ Despite the accusatory nature of the thought, there’s a fondness to her objection. A fondness that she does not want. Pushing aside all thoughts of Harry, she focuses on the problem in front of her. The _real_ problem, how to explain away the attack.

“The only reason you were able to get out was because he carries a portkey on him, one that sends him to some secret hospital,” he finishes with a grim look. 

It’s easy to see the weight the last few hours has put on him. There are dark shadows under his eyes, the slight tinge of gray in his hair more apparent than usual. She’d feel bad, she does, but can’t allow herself to care. Harry should never have contacted him in the first place. She’s fine.

Almost as if he can see the cracks forming, Bill reaches out to her, but she dodges out of the way quickly. She can’t handle his sympathetic looks and comforting touches. His concern. If she does acknowledge it, she sure that it will break her and she’s not sure that she’ll be able to pull herself back up again.

“Does anyone know why we were targeted?” she asks as nonchalantly as possible, avoiding his gaze. At this point, she needs to know the answer more than she needs to appear uninterested.

“According to Harry, it was him they were after and you were just in the way, literally.” She doesn’t have to be looking at him to see the scepticism written all over his face, but if that’s the story he’s decided to sell, well, she’s not about to contradict it.

“Seems like the logical conclusion.”

“Everyone seems to buy it, they didn’t hurt you, not really. They knocked you out and the only reason it took so long for you to wake up was because it was a spell no one recognized... but me, I’m not so sure.”

“Maybe they just didn’t want blood on their hands,” she offers simply as the implications race through her mind. If they weren’t aiming to hurt her, or to scare her, then they were hoping to take her. The very notion of that has a shiver racing through her.

“You went back, did you?” he asks, getting straight to the point, voice weary instead of accusatory.

She opens her mouth, not quite sure what she’s going to say, but fortune saves her from answering by a commotion at the door.

“They’re here!” Ron yells to what is probably the rest of her family, but she doesn’t stick around to find out. Turning on her heel, she moves towards the stairs, away from Bill with his probing questions and everyone else.

“Oi! Where are you going?” she hears Ron call, but she doesn’t let that slow her down.

Right as she’s about to close the door to her room, she faintly hears Bill, “just give her time, she’ll come around eventually.”  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
For one brief instant, she considers opening her window, climbing out and leaving without a trace, but she doesn’t. Leaving now would essentially be giving up and she’s already done that to them once before. Instead, she sits herself cross legged on her bed and pulls up the pieces of herself that she spent years trying to shed.

She remembers the freedom of isolation, the comfort of detaching, and embraces it.

She separates herself into two people, the Ginny of before and the Ginny of now. The Ginny of before sought out the love of her family, had hope for the future, but the Ginny of now doesn’t look forward, she focuses only on the now. She can’t afford distractions, they waste time. They get people killed. Every one of her attachments is a potential target. 

They need to be eliminated. 

With that in mind she gets up, ready to remove her most foolish attachment once and for all.

Her parents and most of her brothers are sitting around the table talking quietly when she gets down there, but she doesn’t let that bother her. She has her cold mask of indifference settled comfortably on her face and she’s not going to let anything slide past it.

Still, she has a role to play, maybe now more than ever, so she forces a slightly sheepish smile onto her face and takes a seat. She notices quickly that neither Harry or Bill or among the people crowded around the table, good, that should make this charade easier. Now all she has to do is convince her Mum.

“I’m sorry I freaked out,” she tells the table, purposely avoiding eye contact with anyone. Let them think that she’s embarrassed, let them see her as a scared little girl. “After the attack, I just couldn’t handle everyone— I didn’t really understand what had happened, and then I did and it all came rushing back..”

She looks up and sees that she’s almost there, she’s almost got them. “You’d think after everything that happened, I would be able to handle being knocked unconscious,” she lets out a self deprecating laugh that she desperately hopes doesn’t sound as hollow to them as it does to her, “but apparently not… and I got sort of lost it.”

Ron lets out a snort, “that would imply you had it in the first place and we’ve all known you’re crazy for years. Nothing new there.”

Exactly as she planned, she sends Ron a grateful smile that hopefully doesn’t look too much like a self satisfied grin. The group continues to talk amongst themselves, the atmosphere in the room exponentially lighter, but she doesn’t let any of that lightness touch her. She keeps the smile on her face, adds the odd comment and nods in the right places, but inside she’s plotting the best way to approach Harry. He won’t be as easily convinced.

“So you and Harry,” George asks suggestively, as though he can read her thoughts. She does nothing but shrug in answer hoping that they will attribute it to her not wanting to say anything and not the fact that she literally does not know what to say.

“Really, that’s all we get? No salacious details. You kept it a secret for long enough.” He leans forward on his elbows, Fred matching his pose beside him. “When did it start?”

She just keeps her lips sealed, but allows her annoyance to show through her defence. They need to stop, the sooner the better. She doesn’t have the patience for this. There are other things that need her attention, things that are much more important than the trivialities of her soon to be non-existent love life.

“It was definitely before they both went to the Quidditch match,” Ron informs everyone with a shutter, “they are not nearly as good at being sneaky as they think.”

The irony almost makes her laugh, he has no idea who she is, none of them do and none of them ever have. The thought sends a wave of justification through her. Sure she’s playing them, but only because they allow themselves to be manipulated. 

A sense of righteousness washes over her. This is what she should be doing. This is the only way to save them all.

The surge of confidence shows up just in time. Right as she feels the role slide more firmly in place, the back door opens and Harry walks in. He looks surprised to see her sitting at the table, by all appearances okay, and she can’t help but find some satisfaction in surpassing his expectations.

“Oh you’re up?” he says and then rubbing the back of his neck he shoots a nervous glance at her family watching him with interest, “could we go…” he gestures out the door he just came through.

By all accounts she should be grateful for the opportunity to talk with him alone. After all, it’s exactly what she came down here to do. Still, she can’t help the nervous anticipation racing through her. She digs her nails into her hand and forces herself to stand up. Giving into the fear is not an option, not anymore. He can’t be her safe place.


	11. Chapter 11

As they walk towards the tree line Ginny watches Harry’s back, daring him to look at her which he doesn’t. _Coward._

“Were you able to find anything out about the people who attacked us?” she asks, once it’s clear that he’s not going to say anything. 

He looks surprised at her question, his head snapping up like he forgot she was there. “No… I went back after you left, that’s where I was, but there was nothing to be found.”

She starts to interject, but he continues before she can get a word in. “I looked. There was no magical trace, no hint of who they were or what they wanted. All I can say is that whoever did it was good.”

The weight of that statement settles between them as they make their way further from the house. The longer the silence drags on the more awkward the air between them gets. Until eventually he stops, turning around to face her with a sigh, a defeated set to his shoulders. “Are you all right?”

She kind of wants to curse him, at least punch him, but she refuses to give him that power. Instead she mirrors his pose, crossing her arms. “Fine.”

It’s clear that he doesn’t believe her, but she doesn’t care. He was never going to buy an act from her the way the others had, she foolishly let him get too close. Now, she’s just going to have to break that bond swiftly and with no remorse.

Ginny squares her shoulders ready to take the plunge, but he continues before she gets the chance.

“Good… that’s good,” he shuffles around a bit, still avoiding looking at her, “but it can’t happen again. We can’t happen.”

There’s a beat of silence between them where she just stares blankly at him, unable to comprehend his words. They can’t reach her, not through the shield she’s built up around herself.

He continues on more vigorously as though he were emboldened by her lack of reaction. “This is for the best, really, it never should have started again in the first place. It is better for you this way.”

If she had more energy, she’d definitely find issue with that logic. Instead, she just lets out a humourless laugh. 

“Always trying to save me,” she accuses him coldly, “too bad you could never figure out that I didn’t need to be saved.”

“It’s not that,” he protests, finally looking at her. She notes his sorrow filled eyes with contempt. 

“Like hell, it’s not,” she responds, his direct attention being forth more emotion than she’d like. She looks at him, really looks at him standing there and then shakes her head.

“You’re so full of shit,” she says forcefully, voice growing in volume. He winces and starts to say something, but she talks over him. “You walk around acting like you’re so much better than me, so much more together. Looking at me like I’m the broken one—“

“I don’t.”

“You do!” she says, voice shaking with emotion, “but you’ve never judged me for it. I’ve always lo— I’ve always appreciated that, but it’s just one big fat lie. You may have come back Harry, but you never stopped running.”

The realization hits her like a title wave, really, deep down he’s still the man that left her all those years ago. The one who was too scared to take a chance on something.

_She’s warm and at ease when she wakes up, a small smile on her face. There’s something comforting about waking up in the same bed two days in a row, especially when it’s a bed that contains a certain someone. The smile grows on her face as she thinks about him. Stretching her arm out, she tries to nudge him, to wake him up, but her hand falls through empty air._

_A wrinkle finds its way onto her brow. The sheets beneath her hand are cool to the touch. It’s strange that she didn’t hear him leave, didn’t feel him move. Normally, she’s a light sleeper._

_Pushing the confusion aside, she pulls herself up so that she’s leaning against the headboard, wrapping the sheet tightly around her to fend off the cold air. She looks around, but there’s no sign of him in the small space. She can’t hear him moving around in the bathroom either._

_Anxiety tries to pull at her stomach, but she pushes it down. Yesterday while they were out he mentioned the amazing bakery a few streets over. He’s probably there getting some treats for them to enjoy in bed. After all, it’s his home, he’s not just going to abandon it to avoid her._

_Yet, even as she tries to convince herself that it is fine, she knows it’s not. There’s something different about the space, as if the essence of him disappeared while she slept._

_She shakes her head to try and banish the ridiculous thoughts, but they prevail. She examines the room once more trying to figure out what’s different and that’s when she sees it. A neatly rolled scroll, delicately placed on the island._

_The weight settles deeper into her stomach. She knows what that letter is going to say and she doesn’t want to see it, not at all._

_She stays frozen in the bed, starring the piece of parchment down like she can will its existence away, for far longer than she’d like to admit, but eventually, she pulls herself out of the now frosty feeling bed and starts putting on her clothes._

_Still, she does it slowly, foolishly thinking that maybe if she takes long enough, he will reappear proving her wrong. He hasn’t by the time she’s finished dressing. His time is up, she should leave, but still she lingers. Waiting for what, she’s not quite sure._

_She’s not angry exactly, he’s known her for barely 48 hours, he doesn’t owe her anything, at least not anything more than an explanation, but she’s annoyed. If he didn’t want anything more than a few nights of fun than that’s all he had to say. She wasn’t looking for anything more._

_If she’s honest with herself, she’s also disappointed. She thought she had found her place again after so long, only for that feeling to be ripped away from her the second she grasped on to it._

_Despite her mixed feelings, she still forces herself to go read the letter. Leaving without looking would be the cowardly thing to do and she may be a lot of things, but she isn’t a coward._

_When she picks it up her hand is shaking, from anger, she tells herself, not from nerves._

I know this isn’t what you expected, it’s not what I hoped for either, but it’s the way things have to be. I’m not meant for you, at least not now. In another life, a different time, I would have loved to have shown you the world. As it is, all I can offer you is a place to sleep. Stay for as long as you need.

Goodbye.

_The anger that she was trying to delude herself into feeling, rushes forward a vengeance. Who in Merlin’s name does he think he is. The savour of the world. Yes, she’s disappointed that he disappeared without having the decency to look her in the eyes and leave, but he’s acting like she’s going to be some heartbroken fool._

_She takes hold of the anger and uses it to ground her. She doesn’t want to be here anymore. In that moment it doesn’t matter that she had nowhere to go, anywhere would be better than here._

_Quickly, she gathers up her belongings, shoving them into the bag that has been their home for so long. With one last glance around the space, she heads to the exit, but just as she’s about to open the door, the glint of the sun reflecting off something catches her eye._

_The table next to the door is ordinary in every sense of the word, lacking personality like the rest of the space. Everything on it is something that you would find on a hotel table, except for a small keychain. She picks up the object of interest and lets it dangle in front of her._

_The figurine of a stag stares back at her, made of solid bronze with tiny emerald eyes. It looks expensive. It looks important._

_She’s just about to replace it on the table when his words come back to her_ all I can offer you is a place to sleep _and a wave of bitterness makes its way into her mouth. Instead of returning it, she pockets it and then walks straight out the door._

_There’s no time for looking back._

She’s pulled out of the memory by a gentle hand on her arm which she jerks away from quickly. He doesn’t get to do that, not anymore.

“I’m sorry, I never meant to hurt you. Merlin,” he lets out a half choked gasp, “that’s the last thing I wanted to do.”

She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t want to see the devastation on his face. “You didn’t hurt me.”

Even as she says it, she knows that it’s not something either of them believe, but it’s the truth. He didn’t hurt her, she hurt herself. She knew what this was, where it was going to end from the very start. She _knew,_ but she went for it anyways.

What she should do is turn around and walk away without another word. Every second she lingers is just more damage against her emotional wall, but still, she hesitates.

“Are you sure?” she asks with her back turned. It’s easier when she doesn’t have to avoid the temptation of looking at him.

“What?”

She squeezes her eyes shut willing them to stay dry. There’s a lump in her throat and a weight in her chest, but she can’t acknowledge them. She can’t and still do what she has to do. “Are you sure, because this time there’s no coming back. We aren’t strangers anymore and I’m done running. So if this is you walking away, it’s you walking away forever.”

His ragged breathing is loud in her ears. Every impulse tells her to turn around and make this better for him, but she fights them. She knows the position she’s put him in, what choice she’s forcing him to make, but it’s the way that it has to be. He has to make the call, has to say it, otherwise tomorrow or some day soon he’ll be back with his charming grin and kind eyes telling her his sorry, fighting to get her back and she’ll be tempted to give in.

“I’m sure.”

That’s all she needs to hear. One foot in front of the other, keep going until it doesn’t hurt anymore. Until there’s nothing to feel at all.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
By some miracle, everyone has left by the time she returns to the house. The kitchen is as dark as the last time she left Harry standing by the trees. She moves through the space on auto pilot, until her Mum’s voice coming out of the shadows, falters her steps.

“Are you all right, dear?” she asks, her tone as kind and compassionate as it has ever been.

More than anything Ginny wants to brush her off and head for the sanctuary of her room, but it’s not about what she wants anymore. It never should have been. Every choice she’s made since she left all those years ago has been about protecting herself, when, really, there are far more important people to worry about.

“It’s over,” she tells her softly, allowing some of the hurt that she could be feeling to come through despite what it costs her. If she plays this right, her Mum won’t see anything when she looks at her other than a broken-hearted girl, the scars that she’s sure aren’t far from her mind will fade into the background. 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she responds sympathetically. 

All she has to offer in response is a half-hearted shrug, “it’s not like we were anything special, but I thought that— maybe, one day we could be.” 

She can hear her Mum moving towards her before she can see her. She braces herself for the embrace that she knows is coming, willing herself not to flinch away at the contact.

From her position with her face carefully hidden, pressed against her mother’s breast, she is able to let the numbness take over, to let the comforting words of her Mum come to her through a fog without worry that her lack of response will give too much away.

After a while, far too long, her Mum pulls away, “is there anything I can do? Maybe I can talk to him…”

She shakes her head quickly, that is the absolute last thing she needs. “I’ll be fine. Eventually.”

Looking up, she sees a glassiness to her Mum’s eyes. She needs to get out of here before they start to fall. For the most part, she’s comfortable in this place, playing this version of herself, but she doesn’t believe for one second that she will be able to cry convincingly.

“I think I’d like to be alone now,” she tells her Mum letting a shaky grimace adorn her face.

“Oh right. Of course!” she responds instantly, moving away and not so subtly wiping at her eyes, “just call if you want some company.” 

Within a second of the dismissal, she’s moving up the stairs, half formed plans of investigation and thoughts of tracking already racing through her mind.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
Her conversation with her Mum has its desired effect and she is mostly left to her own devices over the next couple of days, free to theorize and debate internally for hours without interruption. And to plan. She spends a lot of time planning. Sitting in the dark of her room, listening to the familiar sounds of the house and going over everything she can think of regarding this case.

She makes sure to show her face at meal times and once or twice her Mum comes to ask her something, but for the most part, she’s alone and it’s wonderful. The near constant isolation is exactly what she needs to figure this all out. It’s all going just as she wanted or at least it is until Bill comes knocking on her bedroom door less than a week after the attack.

He opens the door before she’s given the okay as though he knows that if left to her own devices, she’d just never offer an invitation. For a second as she listens to him enter the room and pause beside the bed, she considers just pretending to be asleep. She’s laying in bed with her eyes close and her arm thrown comfortably across her pillow. It would be easy, but also weak and she’s done being weak.

Ginny opens her eyes to see the imposing figure of her brother staring down at her, but she makes no noticeable reaction. “Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

There’s no pity in his eyes, just a hint of uncertainty, but really that is to be expected. He hasn’t seen her since she walked away from him right after he brought her here from the hospital. She thinks that her Mum must have been running interference over these last few days to keep him away, but she’s not sure.

“Fine,” she tells him easily, moving so that she’s sitting cross legged in the centre of the bed. it’s the truth. The soreness from the attack has long faded away, she’s back to her old self in more ways than one. “I’m all fixed up, you wouldn’t even know there was an attack in the first place.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he responds, levelling her with his best unimpressed look, the one she has the distinct impression that he uses on his daughters.

She makes no effort to hide the massive eye roll that his comment triggers. He knows she doesn’t want to have this conversation, there’s no need to pretend otherwise, but then again when has that ever stopped him.

“I’m fine,” she repeats again more forcefully, “it was nothing.”

“It didn’t look like nothing to me,” he counters, pushing her as though he thinks his words and disapproving gaze alone would be enough to break her. It’s ridiculous. He knows more than most what she’s faced, his disappointment is nothing in comparison. She doesn’t care what he thinks. She can’t care about it, not anymore.

She holds his gaze for a long moment, debating the pros and cons internally, and then eventually relents, looking away from him and down to her hands in her lap.

“We knew each other before,” she reveals quietly, but purposefully. He needs something, some detail to latch on to in the same way her Mum did. Once he gets that, he’ll be able to move on and so will she. People are so predictable.

“Yeah, I figured that out… not right away, but eventually, between things you’ve said and stuff he mentioned—”

“Oh right, I forgot, you two are all buddy, buddy.” There’s more than a twinge of snarky sarcasm to her comment which is exactly what she needs. She gave him something and now he’ll feel compelled to reciprocate. Maybe, she’ll finally be able to learn what’s been going on with them, what they know that she doesn’t. It’s probably not going to be super helpful for her objective, but at this point she’ll take any small detail she can get.

“I knew him back when he was just a kid— well not a kid, a teenager, but he always seemed so small, crushed down by the weight of the world's expectations.”

She doesn’t allow his words to touch her heart, Harry has faced his struggles like everyone else, that doesn’t make him special. It doesn’t give him a free pass. Instead of focusing on the emotional, she focuses on the logical, searching through his explanation to find the information that matters.

The picture finally comes together, “the Order of the Phoenix.” 

“Yes…. kind of.”

“Kind of?” she asks annoyed. They don’t have time for _kind of._

“You know that I was partially involved in the war effort,” he pauses to make sure she’s following, but she just nods, eager for him to get to the point. “I worked with the Order of the Phoenix occasionally, not enough to actually be considered a member, but whenever they needed something done in my field, well, they knew to call me.”

“And?” That still doesn’t really explain anything for her, as far as she thought, Harry wasn’t an active part of that organization either.

“And I don’t know for sure, honestly, you probably know more than me at this point, but I believe that Harry and his crew had a similar relationship with them. When it was necessary, they would work together. And so occasionally, we would end up working together, until eventually we started working together without the Order as a go between.”

It’s starting to realize that there were things going on back then, alliances being made, that she still has no knowledge about. It puts her on edge, she’s supposed to know these things. He was supposed to tell her these things. Really, she thought he had, but apparently he was holding back. Not really a surprise.

Bill continues on, either unaware of or willing to ignore her momentary dismay, “I lost touch with him after that end of the war, I get the feeling that everyone did. Back then it was rough, for me, for everyone, but especially for him..”

"You'd better not be about to defend him" she responds, getting back on track, pulling the mask on more firmly. She’s supposed to be playing a role here, to be the insulted sister annoyed by her brothers questioning. She let herself get caught up in the answers, but they are not answers that matter and she needs to remember that. If she just continues to play the part, eventually he will leave, no longer suspicious of his baby sister’s motives and then, only then, will he be safe.

“No! Of course not!” he says hurriedly, “just, you maybe more than most know what it’s like to walk around pretending to be fine when there’s demons threatening to pull you down.”

She knows what he’s trying to do, but it didn’t matter. The wall is back up, stronger than ever and it’s not coming down any time soon.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
If there is one benefit to Bill’s inopportune visit, it’s that it reminds her of their last conversation and his revelation about the wards. It takes her a couple of hours of intense examination and then complicated spell work, but eventually she is able to unravel the protections surrounding the Burrow and place her signature right next to Bill’s in the loophole he so conveniently created.

After that, she is able to escape the confines of the Burrow freely without the need for explanations. Well almost. She isn’t able to leave for long, especially during the day when she knows that anyone can come and check up on her at any time, but she does make good use of her nights, Apperating away the moment she’s sure her parents have settled.

That first night, and the subsequent two, are spent at the site of the attack carefully combing every nook for something that might have been overlooked. It’s only after every part of the intersection is examined twice over and she’s exhausted every detection spell she knows that she finally admits that there’s nothing to be found.

It’s an annoying set back, one that threatens to make her lose her carefully crafted calm at the breakfast table the next morning, but she pushes it down. She will figure this out. She has too.

The next night she breaks into one of the more sketchy magical book stores, searching the shelves high and low for anything related to magical bondage and fertility. She takes more than a dozen tombs hoping that somewhere in one of them she will find a reference to the cup that they saw. If she can learn more about it then maybe she will be able to trace its history and that will finally lead her to some answers.

Days go by and she scours the books for some clue, but there isn’t any. With every set back, she gets more frantic. She goes to another store, deep in the heart of Knockturn Alley, looking for information, but again there’s nothing. It’s just like last time, no one seems to know anything. The device, which was by far her most promising lead, is either too old or too uncommon to be found in any records.

She lands back in her bedroom, nearly two weeks after the attack with nothing more to show for than what she had the day it happened and she has to stifle a scream. There has to be something she’s missing, some road that she hasn’t traveled down yet, but there’s nothing. She doesn’t know what to do anymore than she did back then.

Panic threatens to consume her, a nervous energy has taken hold that she cannot shake, but still, she pushes forward. She goes through the motions talking with her Mum, listening to her Dad tell stories, but all the while her mind is racing trying to find the answer to a riddle that she only partly knows. 

It takes her longer than she'd like to find another viable path, each day a stab in her chest as she thinks about the girls that are waiting on her, but eventually one comes. She’s sitting surrounded by her family when someone mentions that they were looking in the paper for job advertisements.

Her mind races back to that day in the ministry and the question of who hired them. It’s not much to go on, arguably more feeble of a lead than any other she’s followed, but it’s something and right now that's all she needs.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
All things considered, it doesn’t take her as long to track down the initial job advertisement as it could, but it still takes longer than she’d like. Although to be fair, everything seems to be taking longer than it should where this case is concerned.

A few letters to inquire about past papers, then another few nights spent looking through rooms of files and she’s finally found, not only the original advertisement that she saw, but half a dozen just like it spanning over three years.

There doesn’t seem to be any regularity to the advertising, and it always says the exact same thing so there’s not much new to learn. The only thing that the multiple copies tell her is that whoever set out to expose this, has been trying to do so for a long time.

They must have been getting desperate.

The wave of regret that washes over her is not new in any sense. In fact, it’s almost so familiar now that she doesn’t notice any change. She should have been keeping up to date with the British papers, she should have noticed when they started expanding their search further. She should have been paying attention. Over and over again a mantra of regrets repeat in her head, reminding her of her failures and mistakes. A constant rhetoric that she doesn’t have the time or the energy to feel. 

Making copies, she pushes forward like she knows she has to, preparing herself for another night of hopeless searching, determined to succeed despite the ever increasing odds against her.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
As the days pass, Ginny knows that there are bags growing under her eyes, that there’s a lifeless to the shine of her hair, but she ignores it all. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter, not right now. She still plays her role, interacting with her family, coming down for meals, but for the most part, all she does is pick at the food on her plate, the sounds of laughing and conversation distant in her mind.

Her mind has other priorities. Figuring out the identity of the advertiser has not been successful in the slightest and she doesn’t know where to go next. It’s another dead end that she refuses to accept, one that she’s certain she will be able to get if only she thinks about it harder.

So intent on her mission, she doesn’t recognize the tension building in the small kitchen one Sunday afternoon until she hears her name called out hesitantly.

“Ginny,” Harry says softly. She looks up and sees him lingering in the doorway, not that she needs to look to confirm that is him. Now that she’s focused on the room in front of her, his presence is unmistakable.

She should probably be surprised that he’s here, he hasn’t been to one family event in the month since she walked away, not that she can honestly say that she was paying much attention to his movements, but she isn’t. She’s just numb

Now that she’s noticed it, the silence is palpable. Everyone in the room is looking between the two of them like they’re waiting for a spectacle, something they aren’t going to get as far as she’s concerned. She doesn’t care if he’s here. He should be here, they are his family as much as hers.

He can be here as long as he’s not here for her. He can’t come here expecting something from her because she doesn’t have anything left to give. He doesn’t matter to her. He can’t matter to her. At least not in the way that everyone else is assuming.

“Hello,” she says politely, forcing a genuine, if not somewhat strained smile on to her face. It takes a second and then it seems like everyone in her family lets out one collective breath of relief, but there’s still an edge to the air. 

"Do you need an invitation?” she hears one of her brothers tease Harry still lingering in the doorway, perhaps trying to defuse the tension before it builds up again.

He shakes his head like he’s annoyed at the remark, but it’s easy for her to tell that he’s more relieved at being invited back into the fold than anything as he steps into the kitchen. With him firmly in the house and the remaining tension seeps out of the air, the noise resumes and Ginny is free to retreat back into her mind.

In the days since she found the paper, she’s searched every record she can think of, both magical and Muggle, but so far there’s been nothing. It’s like whoever posted the job has turned into a ghost, not to be found through any means. While it’s possible that the name at the end of the listing was just a fake, her instincts are telling her otherwise.

People don’t just make up names from nothing. She thinks back to her 11 year old self and Tom Movolo Riddle who would grow up to be none other than Voldemort himself. The name has to mean something, or else why include it at all. Many others don’t without question. It has to be a clue, but how she’s not sure.

She passes through most of the afternoon moving the letters around in her head, trying to find a pattern, interacting with the people around her the way that she’s now accustomed. It’s all working, it’s bearable even if she continues to look out the window, watching the sun set and counting the minutes until she’ll be able to excuse herself to her room for the night without suspicion.

Just as she thinks she’s free, climbing up the stairs to her room after saying a long goodnight to her parents that Harry decides to make things difficult. Popping out from behind his invisibility cloak, he motions for her to not freak out and then casts a silencing charm on the landing they’re squeezed into.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to ambush you, but I couldn’t think of any other way to talk and I didn’t think you’d want me to say anything in front of everyone.” He says it all quickly like he’s sure that she’s going to cut him off any minute, but she wasn’t. Why would she? What would it actually accomplish?

She stands there quietly, waiting for him to continue, but he doesn’t. He just stands there looking at her blankly like he doesn’t recognize the person in front of him. He probably doesn’t, he never really knew this version of her.

“It’s fine,” she tells him calmly, sensing that she needs to say something if this conversation is going to keep moving.

He blinks at her a few more times and then clears his throat, “Uhh have you been able to find out more about who attacked us? About the… stuff we found?”

She starts shaking her in the negative, intending to tell him that she hasn’t had any luck, but he starts talking before she opens her mouth.

“And don’t say you haven’t been investigating.” Despite the accusatory tone of his voice, he looks more relieved than frustrated saying it.

“I wasn’t going to,” she responds without any heat, “I’ve looked but there’s nothing. At least nothing I can find.”

She doesn’t let any of her own frustrations show through and she must succeed because he just squints his eyes at her in confusion.

“I haven’t either. Maybe— we could work together? You could maybe catch something I’ve missed. It would hurt to compare notes anyways.” There’s a hopefully look in his eye when he makes the suggestion, but it doesn’t touch her.

“Harry,” she says with a purposeful sigh, knowing that continuing this conversation any longer is pointless, “I’d just like to go to bed.”

She doesn’t squeeze past him, doesn’t make any move to get though. Choosing instead to wait him out with an uninterested look on her face.  
Minutes pass, he doesn’t move and her expression doesn’t change.

“Ginny, are you okay?” There’s concern in his voice, but that doesn’t reach her either.

“I’m fine,” she says calmly, “just tired.”

She looks pointedly towards her bedroom door a few steps away. He focuses his attention on her again, carefully examining her and she lets him, confident that he won’t see through her mask.

It takes another few moments, but then he steps aside shaking his head. She doesn’t linger to see the confusion settle on his face, moving swiftly towards her door and then shutting it firmly behind her. Another hour and she should be good to leave. She doesn’t know where she’ll go tonight, or even if she’ll find anything, but still, she’s going to go because anywhere is better than sticking around here waiting for an answer she’s honestly not sure is coming.


	12. Chapter 12

In the end, Ginny’s not able to come up with any successful answers to the name problem on her own so she’s forced to extend her search. Standing on a tall hill in the middle of rural England, the warm spring air making her hair fly wildly around her face, she does something she never thought she’d do again. Lifting up her shirt, exposing her hip, she presses the tip of her wand to her mark and summons any of her old order members still bearing their mark to her.

She waits a few seconds, the burning, both reassuring in its familiarity and disconcerting in its renewal, and then pulls the wand way. With a sigh, she settles on the ground content to wait and hope that at least one of her members is still willing to answer a call after all these years. She sits and waits, the strange magic still tingling across her skin.

It doesn’t take nearly as long as she thought it might before the gentle sounds of the environment around her is distributed by the crack of Apperation. 

She doesn’t recognize the tall woman that shows up, not really anyway, but that’s not a surprise. After all, the group was never about making friends. Still, she feels a wave of comfort wash over her just from the fact that someone showed up. 

They may not have been friends, some of them weren’t ever truly allies by the end of it, but there was a level of trust between them all. A level of support and deep seeded understanding that the battle wasn’t yours to fight alone. Even though you were fighting alone, you could know that some other member was fighting a similar battle somewhere, somehow.

There’s a kinship in that knowledge. One that she’s missed. 

“You called?” the woman asks, straight forward like all of them have always been.

“Yes,” Ginny says, standing up and pulling a copy of the advertisement out from her back pocket, “I need information on a name.”

She hands the piece of paper over and then tries to wait patiently, hoping that she will somehow have the answers that she can’t find.

The minutes pass and she has to force herself not to fidget, a nervous tick that she thought she broke free of a long time ago. It’s only just as she’s about to give into the urge to shift her feet that her answer comes to her in the most unexpected form; a laugh.

Ginny watches her companion warily, concerned for the first time that she’s summoned someone unstable. The beautiful woman standing before her would not be the first to succumb to the traumas of the war years.

It’s only once she’s managed to subtly move her wand into her hand that the woman starts to explain her reaction.

“You want to know about Coby Williams,” she clarifies before continuing a tinkle in her eye, “it’s quite the scandal.”

Ginny is sure her surprise shows on her face based on her counterparts’ pleased expression, but she doesn’t actually care. Coming here, using the mark, was a last resort, a final effort that she never really believed would yield results.

“Now,” the woman adds on turning serious for a moment, “I can’t be certain the person you’re looking for is that one that I’m thinking of, I’ve only ever heard it as gossip for my husband about his estranged family, but from what I gathered, this was the nickname he went by amongst friends, not that he had many.”

Not discouraged in the slightest, Ginny nods her head eagerly. At this point, anything is helpful.

“The story goes that his mother, Marlee Blishwick, was betrothed to one Calig Rosier. They married. She was resistant, but she had been told all her life that it was her duty and that she would not live escaping that duty.”

“Her family...” Ginny starts, outrage fueling her words before her brain catches up and stops her.

For a second as she is looked on with a pitying gaze, Ginny feels like that naive child again, waking up surrounded by a group of people, telling her simplistic view of the good and evil is not nearly as clear cut as she believed. 

“Back then that was the reality for a lot of pure blood children, women and men alike.” She says it as a statement, just a fact, but still, Ginny wants to argue it, to remind her that there have always been old families like hers who value the prospect of choice over blood status. She wants to argue, but she doesn’t. It’s not the time and she has more important priorities. 

She waits for a moment to ensure that Ginny is going to remain silent and then continues her tale. “She stayed in the marriage for a year, suffering quietly like she had been told to do and then one day, she found out she was pregnant. Still, she stayed, hoping that his father would be kinder to him than to her. She stayed through the pregnancy, but then, one day when the babe wasn’t not even 6 months old, she disappeared.”

“They searched for her with no luck. Years go by and there’s still nothing. Her husband remarries and everyone pretends that the first marriage didn’t happen. Her name drifts into the shadows like she never existed in the first place.”

“The whole horrid affair is brushed aside until 11 years later she is found hiding in the Muggle world with the name Marlee Williams and her son is taken to live with his father now living with his wife and two sons.”

She doesn’t have to ask to know what happened to her. Really, the best that she can hope for is that she was killed quickly and not in front of her son.

“He’s real name was Jacob.”

Before her eyes flashes a memory of a boy in a Deatheater outfit, unable to or maybe unwilling to make the kill shot and her words of warning to him.

“But his friends called him Coby.”

In an instant, it all comes together for her. The slivers of information she’s carried around for years finally moving to form a completed picture.

She knows what she has to do.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
As much as she wants to go right to storming the Rosier manor, for that’s now where she’s sure that they are being held, she forces herself to hold back, to stop and plan. It’s something that she didn’t do last time and she can’t help but feel like that was part of why she failed. She was too excited, too eager.

_When reports start coming in that there’s an unusual amount of Deatheater activity surrounding Blishwick manor, Ginny knows in her gut that they need to act fast. For all her work trying to track the missing girls, she still hasn’t been able to pin a certain location down._

_She has her theories, people who she’s looked into who seem like prime candidates; the ones who lament the diminishing of magical bloodlines. From there, she’s managed to narrow it down to a few key locations, somewhere old, somewhere large, yet mostly deserted and somewhere in the North East of England if she had to guess, but as her fellow members are very quick to tell her, it could be any number of families behind the abductions._

_There was no way to narrow it down, at least not a rational way. For a minute there, she considered the merits of letting her herself be captured, but that quickly got dismissed. That plan would only work if she had someone standing by, tracking her, ready to come to the rescue and she doesn’t._

_If the group was splintered before, it’s completely fallen apart now. Mistrust breeds amongst the walls of their base, walls that are left to listen to nothing but the sound of puttering mice feet as more and more of them abandon the once full room. It’s clear now that one way or another, the war is close to being over and that fact has most of them running back into the shadows._

_Still, when she walks into the room one unseasonably cold May night, she expects to find at least a few volunteers. After all, she finally has the proof that they all told her she needed to act. She’s dismayed to find only two people, a boy and a girl both of whom she’s had little interaction with, sitting on opposite ends of the long room with their books scattered in front of them._

Two is better than none, _she reminds herself fiercely, walking into the space and calling out to gain their attention. As she shares her information, both the old and the new, it quickly becomes clear that neither of them are going to follow her lead. Fighting down the anger she feels at their complacency, she sets off to try and round up more people._

_“No.” is the response that she receives over and over again. Most of them turn away from her with their heads held high, no offer of an explanation or an excuse on their lips._

_The more people that she goes through the more the desperation clawing at her chest threatens to consume her. Time is limited, she knows it. A gathering of that size means that they are planning something and if she waits until it’s already happened then it’s more than possible she’s too late._

_And she can’t be too late. She has to find them before time runs out._

_Even with the mounting pressure to act, she continues to filter through people looking for someone to offer some back up, to offer the girls a better chance, until all at once she realizes the faultiness of her actions. She’s walking around assuming that everyone else cares as much as her and that even if they don’t, they’d have enough faith in her to follow her lead anyways. But that’s not the case and she should have realized it by now. It was the first thing that the group taught her: You’re on your own._

_When she sets off from the castle a few minutes later, it’s not the Order’s signature red cloak that she has draped over her shoulders to protect her from the chill in the air. And then it’s not the familiar hood that she pulls up to conceal her identity when she manages to break through the property line less than an hour later, but a series of glamour charms to her voice, face and hair._

_She enters the house through a window on the third floor, taking the time to cast a silencing charm and then break it with the skillfully aimed throw of a rock, before flying herself throw it with her shrunken broom. Altogether it’s probably not the most effective entrance, but it serves its purpose, allowing her to enter the house undetected._

_Almost the second that she enters the room, she can feel the magic of the house envelope her. The darkness seeps into her skin and clings to her, threatening to overwhelm her. She fights off the wave of nausea through willpower alone and continues on into the rest of the house, remembering at the last minute to make sure no one is in the hall outside._

_As she creeps down the hall to the stairwell, the sensation of someone watching her lingers despite her assurance that she’s alone on this floor. It sends a shiver down her spine._

_The old stairs creak as she makes her way down them, groaning in protest as her weight settles on them, but fortunately the sound is concealed by the many voices coming from the main hall open to the floors above. Carefully, she chances a look downwards into the sea of black robes from the safety of the shadows._

_There are more than a few familiar faces, those that she would like nothing more than to rid the world of, but she holds back. This is not the purpose of her trip, despite how easy it would be to send a blasting hex right into the middle of them. No, the purpose of her venture is to search and rescue._

_With her priorities reaffirmed, she looks down again, this time searching for anyone who looks out of place, maybe one of her missing girls, but it’s no use. There are too many people and the shadows cast on them by the floating candles are too dramatic._

_Stepping further from the wall, she leans closer letting her eyes pass through the crowd once and then twice. She checks every corner looking for something to give her a clue, but the only thing of note is a masked figure standing off to the side stiffly._

_So intent on finding something, she doesn’t hear the approaching voices until they are almost directly in her sight. Two men, with dark cloaks swishing behind them and stark white masks on their faces._

_Hastily, she casts a disillusionment charm and then holds her breath. She can feel the edge of their robe graze her as they pass, but she remains standing rigidly in place, knowing that to move would mean not only certain death for her, but also for those she hopes to save._

_She waits until their footsteps are all but inaudible before she lets out her breath and then she’s running. Running down the stairs and into a more deserted part of the building as fast as she can._

_Centuries worth of art pass her by, the flooring under her transitions from smooth wood to lush carpet, but still she keeps going. Her feet pound on the ground to the in time to her heart. Her breaths rage through her lungs as desperate as her thoughts._

_She keeps going until suddenly she collides with an invisible force, falling on to the ground in a heavy heap that is eerily silent._

_Stunned by the fall, she tries to regain her footing before someone shows up._

_What she doesn’t realise in the darkness of the hall, is that someone is already there._

_“Drop your wand!”_

Ginny feels the same sense of nervous anticipation fill her as she slowly makes her way into Rosier manor, but she’s better equipped to handle it now. She doesn’t run, she doesn’t rush, checking each corner with a diligence that would impress even Percy.

She doesn’t have the freedom to make mistakes, she knows it now. This is her second chance and it’s doubtful that she’s getting a third. 

That’s why she doesn’t outwardly react when she realizes that someone is following her, only a few steps into the house. Instead, she makes a random detour into a hopefully empty room. Either she’ll lose her shadow with the unexpected movement or she’ll be able to take them down discreetly.

On her way through the door she casts a silent detection spell and then moves swiftly to stand out of sight. Anticipation tingles down her spine and every creek of the old house threatens to unnerve her, but she holds steady, her wand at the ready. She stands there, listening intently for any movement, for several long seconds.

Until she feels her alarm go off and then she’s moving out of the shadows, letting all the energy she’d been restraining fuel her movements. She’s ready to cast a stunner, before she’s even fully in view. This is not the time to take chances, it’s not the time for restraint.

The spelling is flying out of her wand the minute she sees the target.

And then who’s in front of her registers.

She moves her hand slightly just in time.

The spell misses him by a hair.

“Harry?”

Ginny blinks a couple times to make sure she’s seeing things correctly. After all, she’s lost count of how long it’s been since she slept, but he remains in front of her and after a few seconds, she’s forced to confront the fact that he’s here.

Of course he’s here, he’s Harry bloody Potter and he’s never once been able to leave anything well enough alone.

Instead of saying anything else, she just stands there and watches him fidget under her scrutiny.

“Okay, don’t be mad, but I’ve been following you. I knew that you weren’t going to stop and that you were going to end up in a situation where you really should have backup… I just couldn’t let you… I didn’t want you to be alone when it came--”

And that’s more than she needs to hear, she decides, shaking her head. He continues to explain, but she just keeps moving. She doesn’t have time for this. _They_ don’t have time for this.

“Wait! Where are you going?” he yells as loud as he dares, racing to keep up with her. “I know that it was a bad idea… and really, a little crazy, but I thought…”

She just keeps going, sticking to the edge of the wall with her wand at the ready, hoping desperately that his talking isn’t giving their position away.

“Can you say something?” he begs. She can feel the burn of his gaze on her back, but she doesn’t turn to reciprocate.

“Shut up.” She doesn’t say it heatedly, there’s no aggression. It’s a simple command that she desperately hopes he has the sense to accept.

“That’s it?” His eyes widen in surprise, “no get out? No I don’t need you? No, I work alone.”

Pausing in her careful examination of her surroundings, she turns to glare at him. _Does he want her to yell at him?_

“Okay, got it.” he says moving to the opposite side to mirror her movements.

Ginny takes a second longer to make sure that he’s satisfied and then continues on, moving further into the dark house.

She has a job to do.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
They make their way further into the house in companionable silence. For the millions of reasons that Harry shouldn’t be here, all the reasons that she doesn’t want him here, he’s at least easy to work with. He’s always just known how to be her perfect partner. It would be unnerving if it wasn’t so helpful at the moment.

They move through the halls a seamless team, him checking one side and her the other. She doesn’t have to stop and tell him what they’re doing or where they are going. And then when they encounter their first opposition, an elderly house elf with a rag around his waist, he doesn’t blink twice when she shoots off a spell to knock him unconscious or when she draws a runed circle around him to contain him.

On and on they go through the dark, seemingly abandoned house, without finding anything. Just as she’s starting to lose hope, their detection charms register a wizard in the next room.

Ginny looks at Harry and together they silently form a plan.

She burst into the room first, banging the door off instead of opening it quietly, relatively confident now that there’s no one else in the house other than the captives. She sends a torrent of wind at the target knocking them off their feet while Harry follows closely behind her, firing off an expelliarmus. 

Once target is on the ground and firmly incapacitated, Ginny moves further into the room. Through the faint light of the dust windows she surveys the man on the ground. He has a pale complexion, which seems even lighter next to his pitch black hair. He seems uncharacteristically young, she’d say her age or younger if she had to guess.

“Don’t!” he says, raising his hands up protectively, “I’m not your enemy.”

Something tingles at the edge of her memory, he looks familiar, but she can’t quite place him. It’s not surprising really, she’s looked at dozens and dozens of faces investigating this case. She turns her head slightly to see if he has any ideas and that’s when it all clicks.

She looks between the two of them again to be sure, but there’s no need. The memory is clear now.

“You?” she wants to sound accusatory, but really she’s just stunned. Out of all the people that she thought she might find here, he definitely wasn’t one of them. Laying on the ground in front them is the same man who showed her around the Blishwick house her first day on the job. The nervous looking man with the stutter and a permanently confused expression.

“Yeah, I know, shocking right?” he says with a self-deprecating grimace. “He’d been trying to find a way out of this mess for years. _Years._ And then— I had to be careful, someone was always watching, where I’d go, what I’d spend and there was no one else to trust, I was all alone. And the girls— they deserve so much better. I wanted to fix it, I needed to, but how? Then you answered the advertisement and admittedly at first, I was a little sceptical—”

“Where are they then?” she asks not caring to hear his explanation right now. “Let’s get them and go before some lunatic shows up and this gets a whole lot harder.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Harry looking at her like she’s lost it. Maybe she has, but now it’s definitely not the time to acknowledge it.

“It’s not that simple,” he says slowly like he’s afraid that she’s just going to attack him for the fun of it.

 _Of course it’s not,_ she thinks bitterly.

“It’s not just— there’s nothing actually holding them captive. At least nothing physical. The ritual they do, somehow it takes away their ability to leave.”

“Like an Imperious,” Harry asks sternly, reminding her that he is no stranger to these types of high stress situations.

“Kind of—” he starts to say, but she cuts him off following Harry’s thought process.

“Which you can break with the right amount of willpower.” She doesn’t know if the legends of Harry being able to break free are true, but she knows it’s possible. It was something that most of her Order members trained themselves to do.

“No it’s not like that— it doesn’t take away their will to leave, all of them, they all want out, but they _can’t_ leave. Once, a couple years ago someone tried.” He lets out a grimace, eyes full of horror in a way that she would never have expected from someone here voluntarily. “She was found a few feet from the boundary.”

Behind her, she can hear Harry make a similar noise of disgust, but she doesn’t allow herself the luxury of feeling. Her focus has to be on figuring this out. The odds are that somehow the ritual bound them, but to what?

To this place? Is there some way for her to remove the boundary line, to extend it. Would that even help, it could make things even worse. Besides that, it seems illogical to her to anchor them to a place, what if they needed to relocate. In fact, she’s pretty sure now that they did and that all those years ago, they were right under her and she just wasn’t fast enough.

To a person then? That makes more sense. She could go hunt down every man in that book and break the bond that way maybe, but that would take time, way too much time. Most of them are in Azkaban, but there’s at least one on the run. It’s not an option, not really.

“The cup,” she says suddenly looking at Harry.

It takes him a moment, but then she sees his eyes light up in understanding. “The cup,” he responds, “we break the cup...”

“And we break the bond,” she finishes for him.  


\------------------------------------------------------------

  
Finding the cup is thankfully easy. For a minute, Ginny feared that they would have to go back to the Blishwick house or worse, that it had been moved to an even more secure place. She’d find it, she knows that with a certainty deep in her bones, but it would be so much better if she wasn’t forced to. She’s tired, so very very tired.

Instead, they are guided through the dark and deserted halls, while the security surrounding the device is explained in detail. “He must have had it brought here after you two broke through the final defences— it didn’t make sense to me then, why he was moving it now after all this time… now though I get it..”

He trails off like he’s expecting one of them to say something and then when neither of them do, he continues on with a nervous laugh. “I tried to get to it, I’m not actually sure what I would have done if I figured it out, but the protections were too complex.”

She shares a look with Harry. This guy seems too good to be true, the Death Eater child with a turn of consciousness. If he was so eager to end this, he could have done it months ago when he first met her. With him, she would have been able to move through the layers of wards easily. It all would have been over in a few days.

Days instead of months.

Logically, she knows that people can change, that you aren’t just who people want you to be, but it all just doesn’t add up. Or at least to her, with her layers of trust issues and general disdain for everyone associated with this, she can’t reconcile the idea that someone this close to the heart of the operation wanted to end it, but couldn’t.

The reality is that she’s waiting for this to all fall apart and she needs to know that Harry is just as prepared for it to happen as her.

“It’s not blood wards again then?” she asks both to get more details and to test him a little. Out of everyone, he should have the most success getting to it.

“No,” he shakes his head slowly, “I think he suspects me now. Really, I’m the only one who could have started an inquiry into that hidden passage… I probably should have held back a little, gone slower, but well...”

For a minute it seems like he’s going to say more, but he holds off, pausing instead to open a door to a small room. The setup is very similar to the way they last found the cup, it sits near the back of the room on a pedestal, the book proudly displayed behind it.

Casting a quick revealing charm, she pauses in the doorway to survey the level of protection surrounding the device. Lucky for her, the enchantments are almost the same, if not a little less refined. She is able to make quick work of them, moving her wand back and forth across the space with precision. 

It’s only once she is less than a few steps away that she pauses, unsure of what to do next. The wards are down, but she still doesn’t know how to destroy it. It’s a magical artifact, likely old, breaking it into a billion pieces with a blasting hex will undoubtedly cause damage, but it might not be enough and she needs whatever they do to definitely be enough.

There are only a few things that are certain to destroy, even the darkest magical objects.

“Have any basilisk venom on you?” she asks Harry who had followed her into the room at a distance.

He turns to look at her, his face a mixture of surprise and amusement. “No, not something I carry around anymore,” he responds with a wry grin she doesn’t care to decipher in the moment.  
Despite her question, she didn’t really think he’d say yes. Still, she hoped. Using Fiendfyre is always risky, even if she has the tools to try and contain it.

“Fiendfyre it is, I guess,” she says with forced bravado stepping closer to the cup.

“Wait! No, are you insane?” she hears from behind her. She turns to look at their companion who she’d honestly forgotten about, before dismissing him with a tilt of her head.

Her eyes then move to lock on to Harry’s. They stare at each other, really look at each other for the first time in a month. “I’ve got this,” she says clearly, telling the room, but mostly him.

There’s a wariness to his eyes still, one that she doesn’t begrudge him in the slightest, it’s a risky plan. Her heart beats wildly in her chest and then he nods his head in approval. 

Faintly, she can hear cries of disbelief from the man behind them, but they don’t matter to her. Harry believes in her, trusts that she can do this because she _can._ The certainty hits her like a wave, filling her with a genuine confidence when she turns back to the cup.

“What do you need me to do?” Harry asks, moving closer.

She thinks about it for a moment. She has only used this spell a few times and each of those times, she only needed to contain the magic for a few seconds, a minute at most, before the spells inside fizzled out. She can probably hold it longer, but Fiendfyre is supposedly infinite. There’s no telling how long it could last

Although, the logic behind the spell is that the fire feeds off of the stuff it consumes. Maybe if there’s nothing for it to eat then it will die off quicker. Maybe.There’s no way to be certain. It’s a risk, but so is everything.

“On the count of three, you send the spell straight at the cup and then I’m going to contain it,” she tells Harry, squaring her shoulders.

The fact that he doesn’t hesitate at all when she starts to count down tells her something else about him and his absolute faith in her, but she pushes it aside for the moment. If this is successful and they both manage to make it out of this, then maybe she’ll consider it.

Strangely, she doesn’t feel nervous as she starts to count down. Logically, she knows that this has a high probability of going wrong, but for some reason she has faith that it won’t. 

Behind her, she hears Harry let out a gasp in astonishment, and then “no, it can’t be,” but she keeps her focus on the spell. 

The sweat starts to drip down her back as she struggles to contain the inferno, but she just grabs hold of her wand tighter and grits her teeth. She didn’t come this far to give up now. The semi transparent orb holds strong even as her arm starts to shake with the exertion.

Just as she’s about to tell Harry to run, left with only the hope of holding on long enough to save him, the fire vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

She can feel resistance fall away instantly, but she holds onto it for a second longer wanting to be sure. When she finally lets the bubble bust, fine white dust is revealed. She watches mesmerized as it slowly falls to the ground. 

“Did it work?” she hears asked from the entrance way.

She turns to Harry, taking a deep breath of the suddenly pure air, and sees confirmation of what she already knows deep within her bones.

It’s done. It’s over.

They’re free and so is she.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are almost there! One more chapter and then just the epilogue to go. If you’re looking for something else to read in the meantime, a group of us, I’m sure you’ll recognize some of the names, wrote a series of originals and published them together in an anthology. 
> 
> All of the different places you can purchase Into the Mystic are found here: [Link](https://books2read.com/into-the-mystic)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	13. Chapter 13

Ginny watches the joy of the accomplishment spread across Harry’s face wishing she could feel the same sense of satisfaction. It’s not that she doesn’t feel the all-encompassing relief, she does. In fact, she probably feels it more than him, it’s just after all this time it’s hard to feel like it’s really over. 

Actually, it’s hard to feel anything at all after so many weeks of numbing herself to the world. The emotions play across her, but none of them land. Despite her best efforts, she can’t quite reach them, can’t get a good gasp on any of them. There are so many, flashing here and then gone. 

Some of her turmoil must show on her face because his smile starts to fade. Desperately, she tries to lock down her emotions, but it’s harder than it’s ever been. Especially when he’s looking at her like he is, careful understanding and compassion bright in his eyes. 

Luckily, she is saved from his inquisitive, yet sympathetic gaze by the loud bang of the door slamming open. She turns just in time to see a flash of robes vanishing into the hallway, their compagin seemingly tired of waiting for one of them to answer. 

She moves to follow him with only a quick glance behind her to make sure that Harry’s following. She calls out confirmation that it worked to him, but it’s no use. There doesn’t seem to be any stopping him now. 

Instead of being annoyed, she matches his rapid pace eagerly, happy to have something else to focus on. If she had to guess, she’d say that he was leading them to the missing girls, looking for his own confirmation and that is exactly where she would like to be. This can’t be over, truly over, until she sees for herself that they are okay. 

The notion that her job isn’t over adds a renewed strength to her steps as they weave through the dark hallways and down stairs until finally, they are in front of a large stone door. She expects him to pause in the entry way for her to disable any protective enchantments. Instead, he pushes the door open with not only ease but familiarity. 

Looking over at Harry, Ginny sees matching confusion, but he just shrugs and pushes the door open himself. He holds the door open for her, allowing her to walk through first and when she does, she stops short. 

In an instant, everything about their mysterious assistant makes sense. His determination, his fear. She wasn’t able to find anything logical in his motivations because emotions aren’t logical; love isn’t logical. And as she watches him tightly embrace a woman, no more than 20 with long black hair like she’s his world, she’s sure that love is exactly what he’s found. 

There’s an uncomfortable tightness in her throat as she observes the two, the closeness between them, the pure intimacy of the moment. She hears or rather feels, Harry’s gasp behind her and suddenly it all actually is _too_ much. 

Tearing her eyes away from the couple, now joined by a child of maybe two, Ginny looks over the rest of the occupants of the room. They aren’t as gaunt or fearful as she worried they would be, but there’s an antsiness to them. A shiftiness as they watch her with a strange mixture of hope and dread. 

She tries to smile at them encouragely, but she knows that it comes up short. Harry, on the other hand, must be more convincing because they suddenly seem more at ease. Placing a hand on her back gently, he walks around her and into the room. She follows behind only slightly hesitant, realising that the couple has separated, at least for the most part, and is now also watching her and Harry in interest. 

“It worked?” Ginny asks the dark haired girl once she’s a few steps away, needing to hear the confirmation. 

“It worked,” she responds with a bright grin, leaning her head against the man’s chest in contentment while he stares down at her in adoration. 

Ginny nods her head in approval, digging her fingernails into her palm to try and keep herself grounded. “And whoever was in charge?”

“My grandfather,” he responds, shifting his attention to Ginny, “at least in the last couple years, he’s upstairs, contained. It was actually great timing on your part… thank you.” 

There’s something so earnest in the way he thanks her, wrapping his arm around the woman more fully, looking at the child in his arm, that Ginny instantly wants to run away. She could, at this point they don’t need her, this is really up to Aurors now. Still, she hesitates. She’s held on to these questions for a long time. 

“You’re not Coby?” she asks, even though she already knows the answer. 

The joy radiation off him diminishes a little. “No, he was my brother-- half brother.”

“Was it you all along?” she questions, brushing right passed the pointed use of past tense for her own sanity. 

“No… definitely not. Coby was the one who understood that things could be different, should be different. It took me a while to see that,” he trails off looking at the woman again, “and even then, even once I knew, well, it wasn’t until he disappeared that I started to take action. I knew about the advertisement, knew what he was trying to do and then after he was gone, I realized it was going to have to be me who did it.” 

Ginny nods, satisfied with the answer even though it adds another name to her list of people that she was too slow to save. She’s about to thank him for that part he did play, but a new voice, small and timid stops her. “Can we leave?” 

After that it’s straight to action. They have been kept here for way too long already, she isn’t going to hold them longer over her desire for more answers. She offers any of them the chance to leave, wanting to give them the choice to disappear off into anonymity if that is what they would prefer, and then gives Harry the go ahead to summon the Aurors. 

An old friend of his shows up, dressed in official robes, greeting him with a kind “you just don’t know how to stay away, are you sure you don’t want to join up?” 

From there, it’s questions upon questions until finally, she is able to escape out the back while both Harry and the majority of the Ministry workers are otherwise occupied. 

She finds herself a small secluded spot not too far from the house and then lets herself collapse to the ground, certain that her legs won’t hold her up for a second longer. She pushes past the urge to empty her already vacant stomach and instead wraps her arms tightly around herself; her body cold despite the relative warm of the summer morning sun shining down on her. 

Sitting there, her body curled in on itself protectively, she tries to calm her racing heart and regulate her breath using the same techniques that have always worked before, but it’s no use. No matter what she does, nothing seems to stop the shaking that seems to have overtaken her body. 

With nothing else to do, she embraces the misery, content to just wait it out. It has to end eventually. 

She doesn’t realize the tears streaming down her face, until footsteps behind her startles her out of her trance like state. She holds her breath, forces her shaking body to stay rigidly still, all in the hopes that she might remain unseen, but ultimately, she knows it’s no use. 

When Harry’s voice rings out loud against the quiet of nature, she expects it. “There you are... I’ve been looking— you just disappeared.” 

She hates the wave of emotion that rushes through her at the concern in his voice, the way that she’s not able to quite muffle the mournful noise that threatens to come out. 

“Are-- are you okay?” she hears him ask somewhat hesitantly. 

“Yes,” she forces herself to bite out. 

“Ginny,” he says softly, conveying a myriad of emotions with her name alone, none of which she wants to hear. 

“Can you just go— please?” She hates the fact that her voice breaks, that it sounds ridiculously close to begging, but there’s nothing else to do. She can’t have him here, not right now while she’s like this. For some mysterious reason, he’s always had the ability to break through her defences or more accurately, sneak through them when she least expects it, and she can’t take that right now when everything already feels like it could topple over at any moment. 

She turns her back on him more purposefully without a glance, thinking that maybe her clear dismissal will deter him, hoping that for once, he’ll just simply do as she asks, but the minutes drag on and she continues to feel his stare hot and heavy against her back. 

“No,” she hears him say, voice soft but resolute, “I think I’ve done more than enough walking away already.” 

Another wave of anguish washes through her, every hurt she’s felt because of him and because of her, rushing to the surface; years of feelings that she never stopped to let herself feel hit her relentlessly and it’s all she can do to try and muffle the sob. 

She feels him step a little closer to her and then pause hesitantly an arm's length away. 

Desperately, she tries to get herself back under control, to lock her feelings into boxes and then bury them deep, but she can’t do it. 

“It’s okay,” he tells her, placing his hand gently on her shoulder and that’s what does it. 

She breaks. 

Huge racking sobs overtake her body and there’s nothing she can do to stop it. She doesn’t want to stop it. For the first time in nearly a decade, she embraces the torrent of emotions within her. And then, she turns and embraces him. 

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t tell her that it’s alright when they both know that it’s not. He doesn’t give her promises of a bright future. Instead, he holds on to her tightly until finally she feels like there’s nothing else possibly left to give. 

They stay like that for a while, finding peace in each other’s arms where there is nothing to fear. She listens to the sound of his heart beating steadily under her head and finds solace in the rhythm. He runs his hands across her back, holding on to her like he’s terrified of the moment he has to let go. 

The sun is high in the sky by the time they part. He clears his throat, subtly wiping at the tears on his face that she knows are there despite not having had the courage to look, and then asks her the last thing she thought he would. 

“Why did you take this job?” 

Maybe it’s the question, or maybe it’s the fact that they are no longer so closely entwined that she doesn’t know where she starts and he ends, but her defense raises back up. 

And then as quickly as they come, the fight falls out of her. She’s so tired. Tired of fighting, in general; with him. 

She shrugs, struggling to find the words “why does it matter?’ 

“Why did you take the job?” he asks her again insistently. “You knew that it could be connected to this case, right?” 

When she nods her head a second later, the only reason is to end his curiosity. 

“Now ask me why I took it?” 

She glares at him for a moment, doing her absolute best to seem intimidating despite the redness that she knows surrounds her eyes, but he doesn’t back down. With a huff, she gives in, “why did you take it?” 

He grins at her exasperated tone, the grin looking strangely out of place with the marks of despair still so plainly on his face. “Nearly six years ago, right at the end of the war, when Voldemort was at the height of his power, I went on this mission— I was looking for something, what’s not important, but instead I found someone. Actually, they found me, you could say, ran right into me....” 

_“Drop your wand!”_

_Ginny looks up at the command and then freezes in place. Standing above her, with their wand pointed directly at her head is a man. She looks him over, taking the time that she might not have to observe him. He’s young, probably around her age, with dirty blond hair and a freckled face, but that’s not what interests her. She looks for points of weakness, areas that she might be able to exploit to get her out of this mess in one piece._

_He holds his wand with assurance, a sturdy grip which tells of practice. In his eyes there is a severity, she can tell instinctively that he’s been in this position before. Yet for the confidence that surrounds him, there’s no arrogance; just as she can see the confidence, she can also sense a reluctance, a hesitance that she can use._

_“And if I don’t?” she finally responds, refusing to bow down to his intimidation. She looks straight at him with defiance, slowly rising to her feet so that he’s now only just over a head taller than her._

_“If you don’t, I’m going to have to make you.” His voice is deep and rough as if it is used seldom, but there’s no mistaking the truth to his threat. She can feel it, tingle down her spine, making the hairs on her neck rise as he says it. The edge to his eyes that she noted earlier, sharpening to a razor point._

_“Okay, okay,” she says, playing up her annoyance. Slowly, she makes a show of releasing each individual finger on her wand as she rushes to think up a new plan. She looks him over again; at the comfortable way he holds his wand and then makes a decision._

_She lets her wand fall to the ground, making careful note of where it lands, and then she is moving towards him with quick steps, her arms raised to fight._

_He looks startled as she advances, she notes with satisfaction. She’s not the most skilled in the art of Muggle fighting by far, but it seemed like a useful tool to have just in case. Most every Wizard she knows will shrink back at the concept of a physical altercation. She pulls her hand back, excitement and adrenaline racing through her, but then he brings his arm up blocking the punch with unexpected ease._

_Her eyes widen in disbelief, but she doesn’t let that stop her. She continues on with her attack, letting muscle memory take over as her mind races to catch up._

_“Who are you?” he asks incredulously, twisting to avoid her kick._

_“I could ask you the same question,” she responds, changing tactics. She can feel herself losing stamina. He’s skilled, maybe more skilled than her. She needs to end this quickly if she’s going to come out on top, but she’s having a hard time focusing. Every instinct told her that he was a pure blood, one who wouldn’t see a punch coming from across the room, but his movements suggest otherwise._

_And more than that, what’s a person trained in the art of Muggle hand fighting doing here. In a place filled to the brim with pure blood elitists?_

_Even with her growing doubts, Ginny continues to attack. The world has taught her that there’s no place for hesitation during a fight. Opposite her, her supposed adversary doesn’t seem to share her ruthlessness. It’s clear now that he’s better than her as he blocks each move efficiently, but despite that he doesn’t press his advantage._

_They are locked in a stalemate, bodies moving together in a rhythmic dance, her blows land in time with her heart rate, until suddenly the pattern is broken and he goes tumbling to the ground, taking her along with him._

_“Dang bloody, long legs,” she hears him curse under his breath, his head pressed against her shoulder. In this position, he has her totally pinned, completely at his mercy, but strangely, she doesn’t feel afraid._

_Then a series of tremors rip through the old house, sending bits of plaster from the ceiling raining on them and it’s no longer like he’s trapping her, but rather that he’s protecting her. The moment that the shaking started he repositioned himself so that her head was sheltered in the curve of his chest and he remains held there until the danger has passed._

_She doesn’t know what to think, how to feel and she doesn’t get the chance, his voice ringing out savagely as soon as the noise of the house dies down._

_“Shit,” he curses again, “is it time already?”_

_He stretches his arm from where it’s wrapped around her protectively to check his watch and then curses again. “We need to go!”_

_“We?” she responds hauntingly with a raised eyebrow. Who does he think he is?_

_“Yes,” he says nonsensically, lifting himself off of her with ease and then offering a helping hand. He waits expectantly with his hand out starched, not sparing a single second to acknowledge her incredulous tone or expression._

_“And what makes you think I’m coming with you?”_

_He lets out a groan, a strange mixture of anger, exasperation and maybe intrigue. “I don’t have time for this! I need to— I have things I have to take care of,” he finishes cryptically, but she doesn’t care. The urgency she felt when he first appeared coming back in a rush._

_“So do I,” she retorts heatedly, the guilt of pausing to interact with him eating at her. With that in mind, she doesn’t hesitate any longer. Rising to her feet without the aid of his hand, she turns away from the direction that he’s trying to urge her, “which is why we should part ways here.”_

_“No.”_

_She shouldn’t do it, but still, she can’t help but turn back around to face him even with the faces of the missing girls haunting her vision. “Excuse me,” she says affronted._

_He doesn’t back down, matching her glare for glare._

_“I can’t let you go off by yourself...” he says just as fiercely, “it’s not safe.”_

_With a single statement, every frustration that she’s pushed down over that last few weeks, few months, few years, all comes rushing to the front. She’s tired, so very tired and just done. With him and his self-righteous attitude, with this case and the missing girls that she can’t seem to save no matter what she does; with the war._

_“You aren’t going to let me do anything.” she tells him tone sharp as ice and ruthless as fire._

_In an instant, the tension is back between them, ten times more intense than the first moment she laid eyes on him. Sparks fly between them and a resolute grimace spreads over his face. She feels a predatory grin overtake hers. A good fight is exactly what she needs to relieve the tension inside of her and that’s what she’s sure she’s going to get now that her wand is back firmly in her grasp._

_She stares him down, waiting for him to make the first move, but before an argument can take hold, a disturbance can be heard from down the hall and they both simultaneously turn their backs on each other to engage the new threat._

_The real threat, if she’s honest with herself._

_They wait, neither looking at each other, entirely focused on the increasing noise, trying to identify where and how many enemies are approaching. He figures it out before her, a confidence replacing the uncertainty that plagued his body before._

_She doesn’t get a chance, however, to inquire before he’s taking her hand firmly in his and pulling her away from the action and back through to the main hall. She rolls her eyes at the motion, but doesn’t pull away. It’s strange how comfortable she is with him, especially since she’s barely been tolerating physical contact with her family over the last year, but she doesn’t have time to analyze the issue._

_Behind her, she can hear them still far too close for comfort as he weaves them in and out of rooms with a familiarity that once again confuses her. She wants to ask him how he knows where to go, or more importantly where it is they are going, but it’s all she can do to keep up to his much longer stride._

_Confused, out of breath, but strangely comforted, they continue on for what feels like ages until finally they arrive back to familiar ground. In front of her stands the main hall from earlier, but it looks nothing like the dark and ominous place from before._

_All around her is chaos, the light from spell fire shoots back and forth creating a web of colour. She notes the presence of sickly green with displeasure._

_What happened?_

_She turns to look at her partner, expecting to see the same unease that comes from the unexpected reflected back at her, but there’s none. Instead, he surveys the fight before them with a critical eye._

_“Where did he go?” she hears him mutter, “Come on.”_

_With that, all of her suspicions are confirmed. He knew that this was coming, it was all part of his plan whatever that might be. She turns to face him more fully, ready to demand some answers, but it’s almost like she isn’t there. He’s eyes scan the people around them, searching with a singular focus._

_Too late, she realizes that they are both standing there, unprotected targets. The flash of light flies towards them, thankfully not green, and all she can do is react._

_Not trusting a simple shield to protect them, especially in a situation where unforgivables are being shot off without a second thought, she goes with the first thing that comes to her mind; an ancient spell designed to encapsulate magic and hold it hostage, that she only knows works in theory._

_Time seems to slow down as she moves her wand though the complicated motions as fast as possible, whispers the incantation under her breath to guarantee the best results._

_Beside her, she finally hears her accomplice react to the incoming danger with a startled gasp and then a frantic curse, but she pays it no mind. Her entire being focused on making sure her spell works. She just has to hope that her partner is smart enough to take out any other danger while she contents with this._

_To her relief, a semi transparent ball shoots out of her wand just in time to stop the approaching light and then, even as she fights to contain the raging magic, the aggressors around them start to fall. She chances a quick glance over to her partner. He moves back and forth with alarming, yet awe inspiring, efficiency, protecting them both._

_When at last the magic inside fades away, she lets the orb fall away. Not willing to take chances, she immediately assesses the situation around her. It’s only once she’s confident that the danger has passed for the moment that she turns to face him. He’s already looking at her, a wide grin across his face that looks foreign, “that was bloody brilliant!”_

_For a moment, she allows herself to bask in his praise, but all too soon, her reason for being her comes back to the forefront of her mind and any levity disappears in an instant._

_He must see the change, despite her defences, because the excitement falls from his face. She takes in the change with only a little regret, preparing herself to once again try and part way with him, but he beats her to it, talking over her before she can get even a full syllable out._

_“Just come with me first and then I’ll help you find whatever it is you’re looking for.”_

_She looks at him, at the sincerity in his eyes. She thinks back to the way that they fought fluently side by side earlier and then the way he was able to move through the manor. The logic helps her rationalize the decision, but there’s no denying that emotion plays its part too, when she slowly nods her head in agreeance to his plan._

_The reality is that she doesn’t want to say goodbye quite yet. He intrigues her and it’s been a long time since anyone has had that effect. Actually, she’s not sure if anyone ever has. Well at least anyone other than a mysterious man in a diary— she should be running in the other direction, if not for the people she hopes to help sake, then for her own, but she doesn’t want to._

“Not what, who,” she tells him, making the decision to trust him despite her fears.

He looks at her inquisitively like he’s truly seeing her for the first time. A slow half smile starts to work its way onto his face and then before she knows it, a matching one is finding its way on to her own. He’s right, a few extra minutes shouldn’t hurt and then she’ll have the backup that she desperately sought before she set out on this mission.

_She’s looking at him, a hesitant nod just starting to take shape when the explosion goes off knocking them both off their feet. She catches one last glimpse of him and then a wall of debris is falling, blocking him from view._

“It was you,” Ginny realizes with a startled gasp coming out of the memory. Thinking back on it now, it’s easy to see, he may have looked different, but the mannerisms are all familiar to her now. The relentlessness, the determination, the responsibility and the care, a deep.and all consuming care. “It’s always been you.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We made it! Here’s the final chapter of IAL. Thank you to everyone who’s read it, seeing your comments, likes and follows regularly makes my day.
> 
> If there is something that I never answered or something you’re still curious about or even if you just want to say hey, I’m over on tumblr as [the-words-in-my-head 12](https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/the-words-in-my-head-12)

Stepping out of the fireplace, Ginny shakes her head a little to clear the lingering effects of Floo travel and then looks around the small room. It always manages to surprise her how similar these places all look. Off-white walls, evenly tiled flooring, gray desks and a single green plant in the corner to separate the rows of fireplaces from the check-in desk; it’s always the same no matter where in the world you might be arriving. 

Yet, for as familiar as the place might seem, it’s not enough to stop a nervous spike of dread from shooting through her when the attendant usures her forward to check in. There’s no doubt in her mind that when the man takes her credentials, he is going to be able to easily recognize her name. 

Despite her and Harry’s best attempts to keep knowledge of their involvement to a minimum, the invasion of the Rosier Manor and the subsequent rescue of the women and children made headlines all over. Now, it’s not just her last name and her relation to her brother garnering attention, she is a spectacle all on her own. 

Losing the anonymity she used to crave has made her latest traveling ventures more challenging, but some uncomfortable appreciation and a few awkward questions are a small price to pay for having them all home and safe. With that in mind, she moves forward, pushing a smile onto her face. 

The nevers linger, not quite as strong as they once might have been until suddenly they are soothed by a calming hand on her back. She turns her head slightly to see a dishevelled Harry, clearly not any more accustomed to Floo travel despite the numerous tips they’ve taken through it in the last few months and the smile on her face doesn’t need any assistance. 

“Oh, are you together?” the attendant asks, looking up from the paperwork spread out before him at Harry’s arrival. 

Ginny looks back to Harry and he smiles down at her with his special, her smile, the one that he’s used at just about every one of these points. After that, she’s able to answer the question with ease. It took a while, they both had loads of issues to overcome, both together and apart, but slowly, they worked to a place where they are clearly definitively a team. 

_After the events at Rosier, there wasn’t any chance of hiding secrets from her family, not with her name tied to the event so closely, but still Ginny hoped that maybe she’d get a chance to pull herself together a bit more before the inquisition started. Those hopes are dashed however, the moment she steps into the Burrow, not even a full day since the traumatic events, Harry a few steps behind her, to find her entire family sitting in the living room waiting for her._

_For a second, feeling the weight of a dozen sets of eyes looking to her for answers, Ginny considers running up to her room or better back out the door, but then she spots her Mum’s hands twisting together, her Dad’s kind eyes, and she forces herself to take the seat left open to her._

_The time for running is long gone. For as much as she wants to just brush the past aside and move forward, she knows that they deserve some answers; they deserve to get to know the real her and she deserves to be able to move forward without her past hanging over her like a heavy weight at all times._

_Still, she doesn’t know quite where to start and judging from the silence radiating across the rest of the room, it is going to be up to her. She looks to Harry then, standing at the doorway to the room like he isn’t sure he belongs and asks him silently for help. Even though she knew that this moment was coming, knew to expect it, now that it’s here, the words she’d planned to say are all stuck in her throat._

_With their eyes on her, watching her every little movement and scrutinizing it, the panic that’s been lingering just under the surface of her skin threatens to overwhelm her. The reality is that she doesn’t know how to start, where to start. There's so much that they don’t know, years and years of half-truths and straight up lies._

_There's no logical reason for turning her attention to Harry, their relationship, if they can even call it that, is still unstable at best. She doesn’t even know what she’s asking of him, but luckily, he seems to understand._

_He holds her gaze for a long moment, instilling her with the confidence that she knows deep down already lives inside her. Then, when she thinks that maybe, she’ll be able to do this, he nods a little, more to himself than her and pushes himself off of the wall._

_Slowly, he makes his way over to her, weaving through her family without looking at any of them. He pauses beside her and then takes her hand in his after a moment of hesitance._

_She looks at him questioningly, but holds on tightly. She trusts him._

_“It’s not really just Ginny’s story to tell— well it is, but she can’t tell it without including some of my past, things that you don’t know about me... maybe we should start with the first time we met?” he asks her, turning his gaze on her instead of the random spot on the wall he’d been staring at before._

_She nods, her agreeance, feeling a weight lift off of her chest. Together they can do this._

_And they do._

_It takes most of the afternoon, but by the end of it her family knows just about everything that either of them have ever kept secret; the danger, the hurt, the deception and some of the good times too, rare as they were. Everything is laid bare. There are tears, mostly from her Mum, some yelling, mainly from people outraged on their behalf, and more than one gasp of astonishment._

_She’s exhausted by the time it is over, but it’s a good type of tired. For the first time when they sit down for dinner, she doesn’t feel like she’s dragging a pile of rocks behind her. Honestly, it’s a relief. A relief that she can’t help but know that Harry feels too when she looks at him out of the corner of her eye from across the dinner table. There’s a lightness to her movements, an ease to his smile that she’s only seen when it was just the two of them. It gives her hope for a brighter future._

_That hope is what gives her the courage to follow him outside after he says his goodbyes to the family._

_“Well, well, well, fancy seeing you here,” she greets him with a grin when she finds him waiting for her with his back resting against an old tree._

_“The night is beautiful and I thought-- well, I thought maybe you’d sneak out to see me.”_

_“No sneaking,” she tells him. She walked right out after him in full view of her family, not caring about the knowing looks she received. She’s done trying to pretend to be something she’s not._

_His eyes widen in surprise and then a faint blush covers his cheeks. “I’m really glad I waited then.”_

_She watches him and the peace she felt inside with her family, grow. Moving, she positions herself beside him so that their arms are just touching. Finding their way back to each other won’t be easy or simple, she knows that, but looking at him under the soft glow of the moonlight, she knows that it will be worth it._

“Yes, we are together,” she repeats for the attendants benefit. 

Harry runs his hand across her back, silently reminding her how happy he is with how everything has turned out and takes over the talking, answering the required and not quite necessary questions. He does it all with an ease that is remarkable, but one she now knows is just as much an act as her forced smile. He’s real to her now in a way that he wasn’t before. He’s allowed her to see the broken bits without reservation and that changed everything for the better. 

Her anxiety still isn’t totally gone, even with him standing beside her, but she’s made her peace with the fact that it probably won’t ever be. It’s a part of her story just like the scars that line her back and the man standing beside her. She doesn’t need to erase it to move past it. 

“You’re both from England?” the attendant asks even though he undoubtedly already knows, there was no attempt to mask their accents this time. She thinks back to England, and then inevitably her thoughts drift to home and her family. 

_“You’re coming back, right?” Ron half jokes from his place opposite her at the table. The mood at their last Sunday family lunch for the foreseeable future is rather dim._

_“Yes, I promise,” she tells him, trying to inject every ounce of sincerity she can into her words. She knows that her leaving is not what any of them want, that much is clear from the way she can see her Mum’s mouth press into a thin line from across the room, but she has to do this. Moreover, she wants to._

_Finally, she’s ready to try and start to heal, but she can’t do that here, not with her family and moreover the world, watching. She needs some time to figure out how to just be again, maybe to how to be for the first time ever. How to be comfortable with herself, but also to figure out how to be comfortable with the man sitting beside. Maybe, then they will actually be able to make whatever it is between them work this time._

_She turns to look at Harry sitting next to her, expecting to find him looking at her with a smile. A look that is becoming more and more frequent, but instead, she finds him locked in a silent conversation with her brother, a crease starting to form between his brows._

_With a start, she realizes that Ron’s question wasn’t posed to her or at least not just to her. Ginny looks at her brother again. He doesn’t look angry or even irritated, but that doesn’t seem to be reliving any of the anxiety radiating off of Harry. Quietly, she slips her hand under the table and entwines their hands, offering a silent show of support._

_It shouldn’t surprise her that Ron is just as concerned around his best mate leaving as his little sister, but consideration for how her family would take him leaving had never crossed her mind. It really should have, she knows that the relationship between the two friends has been strained._

_Surprisingly, most of them took what they had to tell them well, each of them suspecting in their own way, some version of what happened. It was Harry’s revelations about his past, especially his past involving her, that shocked them, particularly Ron._

_They were all understanding, supportive of him in a way that she knew from the start that they would be, but that didn’t stop the occasionally, too sharp comment from Ron about not really knowing his best mate, from slipping out. In the following weeks, she knows that they have come to an understanding, at least as much of one that they could in such a short amount of time. Still, she knows that doesn’t fix everything._

_She looks at her brother again, still watching Harry, waiting for a response and she’s able to identify the emotion that she couldn’t at first glance. He’s worried._

_“We’ll be back,” Harry finally answers, looking straight at Ron. Then more teasingly he adds, “I can’t let you go and get married without me.”_

_Ron holds on to his stern expression for a moment longer and then a broad grin takes over his face. “Be sure you don’t, or I’ll replace you with one of these lot. I’m sure Percy would jump at the chance to be the best man.”_

_It's all lighthearted in a way that she knows Ron is most comfortable with, but underneath is a promise that she knows neither of them take lightly._

_Ginny looks around the room at her family, smiling to herself, and then to Harry. She can’t wait to leave, to go on an adventure around the world, but she also knows that she’ll miss them. She may be leaving again, but this time feels completely different._

_She's not running anymore._

“From there you went to...” 

As Harry describes their itinerary, she gets lost in memories. 

_Throwing the towel she was using to dry her hair on the ground, Ginny reaches down into her bag to grab something before bounding over to the bed. Landing with a bounce on her knees, she directs her attention to Harry lying easily across from her with a pleased grin. So far, they had been here for two days and they have yet to leave the hotel room. A matching smile overtakes her face. It has been a good 48 hours._

_“I’ve got something for you,” she tells him, fiddling with the figurine in her hands behind her back._

_“Oh really,” he says, perking up in a way that she knows is mostly for show. He doesn’t like reviving gifts, she’s learned, but she’s fairly confident that he’s going to like this one._

_“When did you get time to do that,” he adds on after a moment teasingly._

_For a second, she considers answering him, creating some elaborate story just so she can enjoy their unique banner, but instead she just displays her hand in front of her. Palm opened wide, shiny stag on display. She’s held on to this for long enough._

_She watches tensely as a range of emotions flirt across his face. Amusement and confusion. Recognition and then disbelief._

_“Where did you…” he starts with a gasp, fingers reaching out to brush lightly against an antler._

_This right here is the moment that she was avoiding. The hunch she had years ago that the strange token was important to him, is confirmed for her now by the glassiness of his eyes._

_“I took it,” she confesses softly, “I don’t really know why, I told myself when I grabbed it that it looked expensive and that I could sell it...”_

_“But you didn’t,” she can hear the unasked question in his voice, feel the burn of his eyes on her face, but she can’t quite make herself look at him yet._

_Instead, she continues to focus her gaze on the ornament in her hand. “No, I didn’t. At first, I told myself that I kept it as a reminder— a reminder not to let people get too close, but later...”_

_Ginny trails off, needing the extra moment to gather her courage. She knows that she needs to do this, that what they are is never going to work if she can’t learn to be vulnerable, but that doesn’t make it any easier. He lets her have the time, waiting patiently across from her, silent and steady while she gathers her thoughts._

_“The truth is that you mattered to me, even when I thought you didn’t... I wanted something to hold on to.”_

_The air feels heavier after confession, but not uncomfortable like she would have expected. At least, not until she feels the bed shift beneath her. She looks up just in time to see Harry’s back as he moves towards the corner where their bags landed._

_“What--” she starts to say, some additional noises, somewhere between distress and rejection, following, but he quickly cuts her off._

_“Just one second,” he promises, his back still turned._

_When he lands back beside her, she’s pleased, yet surprised to note a careful smile on his face. He opens his hand revealing a worn, stretched out black hair tie to her proudly._

_“Thank you,” she says somewhat questioningly, taking the offering from his outstretched hand._

_A second passes and then he lets out a laugh. Not the quiet, half restrained puff of air that she’s grown accustomed to hearing, but a true, full body laugh. She feels her own chuckle taking hold, even though she doesn’t have a clue what’s so funny._

_It takes him a moment, but when he eventually calms down, he sends a look her way that is so full of unabashed fondness that it takes her breath away._

_“I still don’t remember the moment that I left you,” he runs his hand nervously across the bedspread, “maybe it’s something that my brain knows I don’t really care to experience again— but somehow in the missing time, I acquired this little thing. I didn’t recognize it, had no idea where it came from, but still I couldn’t bring myself to toss it.”_

_A smile graces his lips, “I wore it around on my wrist for a good year and then even after I took it off, I always made sure to keep it close, safely in my bag, sometimes in my pocket. It brought me comfort for some mysterious reason and that was enough to hold on to it.”_

_“It didn’t make sense to me until I saw you again.” He reaches towards her slowly and then twists a strand of her hair between his finger types reverently, and she lets out an involuntary shutter, tension of an entirely different kind building between them. “With your fiery hair and your teasing smile. Then it wasn’t just a hair tie anymore; really, it never was just a hair tie. It was a way for me to keep the memory of you alive even when they were gone.”_

_“But I don’t need it anymore,” he continues with a sweet smile, “because I’m never letting you go.”_

The attendant nods his head in understanding, “and you were in....?” 

_The sun is warm on her back as she lays on the beach with her eye closed. She knows that she should move, sun blocking charms can only do so much with her fair skin, but the thought of getting up seems insurmountable. For the first time in probably a decade Ginny feels truly content. She’s happy, truly and completely, unadulteratedly happy._

_She opens her eyes, squinting at the brightness of the southern sun, to see Harry splashing around happily in the crashing waves. He’s not the sole provider of her new found peace, she’d never allow herself to be put into that position again, but there’s no denying that he’s played a huge part. These last couple months of travel have been everything she could have ever asked for._

_A smile makes its way onto her face as she watches Harry jump dramatically in the water as each wave makes its way to the shore, trying to avoid the splash. She can hear the childish shrieks of laughter all the way from her position halfway up the busy beach._

_While she seems to have figured out how to enjoy the stillness, she’s learned that Harry is still more comfortable in action and he’s in his element here. As much as he likes to deny it, there's something about him, a magnetism that just draws people to him._

_She loves that here, surrounded by people who don’t know who he is or what he’s done, he’s able to freely embrace that part of him which she knows he’s often hesitant to show. She watches for a moment longer, before the pure joy radiating of the group is too tempting to resist._

_Slowly, she sneaks up behind him, putting a finger to her lips to signal to the children to keep quiet and not give away her presence even though she knows that he’s already realized what she’s doing. Some things never change and some instincts are impossible to simply turn off._

_She waits until the water is almost up to her waist before she makes her move. With a final wink towards the kids, she leaps on to him, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. There's a brief moment where she’s out of the water completely and then she’s using her combined momentum and weight to send them both crashing below the surface._

_The water fight that ensues could rival the ones that she used to have with her brothers in the Burrow pond, both of them being competitive by nature. It doesn’t end until he’s got her pinned securely to his chest, so far out into the water that her feet don’t reach the bottom and the sounds of laughter at the shore are muffled._

_“Merlin, I love you,” he tells her with a bright grin, water dripping off his hair and down his face._

_She lets out a carefree laugh and then levels him with her best smirk, “of course you do. What's not to love?"_

_There’s a beat of silence, silence of the best kind, and then he’s shaking his head with a fond smile, before throwing his weight backwards, sending both of them crashing under the surface._

_And the game is back on. Sun and sand, laughter and then half hearted threats, the rest of the afternoon passes quickly. So quickly that it’s not until hours later, back in the hotel room, showered and changed that she comprehends exactly what he said. She expects panic to follow the revelation, it’s a big step, one that would have sent her running not only a few months ago. Yet, she feels no need to flee at all._

_Listening to the sounds of Harry moving around in the bathroom, she just feels another wave of peace wash over her. She loves him. She’s not sure when it happened or how, but she knows it with a surety that she’s known few other things._

_The way that he said it was easy, simple and perfect in a way that she thinks might be telling of a better future. Still, he needs to know that it’s not a joke to her._

_He opens the door, a billow of steam accompanying him. She notes with some disappointment that he’s already dressed, but then she notices him towel drying his hair and has to bite back a smile, the move so inherently him._

_“I love you,”_

_Harry’s eyes widen slightly, the seemingly random confession probably taking him off guard, but then he’s watching her with a blinding smile._

_“Yeah?” he questions a little bashfully, rubbing the towel still in his hand across the back of his head._

_Biting her lip, she registers the hope in his eye with joy, “totally and completely.”_

_She lets the moment hold for a minute, savoring the feeling of loving and being loved. It’s everything she never even dreamed she’d have, but a few minutes later, when Harry asks her again, this time with a teasing glint to his eyes, it’s just as fulfilling._

_“Nope, I take it back,” she tells him with a grin, “don’t know what I was thinking.”_

_He lets out a lough, which she echoes, before rushing to embrace her where she sits on the bed. He lands in a heap, knocking her backwards. She lets out a gasp, half surprise and half laughter and then he’s kissing her firmly. Then she’s kissing him back, infusing every emotion she feels for him with the movements of her lips._

_Then he moves his mouth across her neck, until he’s right beside her ear, before pausing with purpose. Her skin tingles with anticipation as she waits, the ghost of his breath dancing across her._

_The tension mounts and then just when she’s ready to break, he leans closer and whispers, “I love you too.”_

The man continues to ask his questions and with each a vision of the place flashes before her min. A quiet café and a crowded street. Breathtaking mountains and a simple cabin. Harry’s body pressed against hers, his soft smile in the morning. 

“Are you here for work or pleasure?” 

“Pleasure,” she says speaking up for the first time in a while, “he’s showing me all his favourite places.” 

“We’re showing our pasts to each other,” Harry explains wrapping his arm around her more fully. 

She knows that they probably look like lovesick idiots, the kinds of people she used to judge, but she can’t bring herself to care. She’s happy and there’s no stopping the world from seeing it. 

The man smiles at them, not in a condescending way like she’d expect, but with a glint in his eye as if he knows the beauty of what they share. “It looks like everything is set then,” he places a stamp on each of their documentation. “Welcome! I hope you enjoy your stay.” 

They both thank him and then continue on their way. Each with their own bright grin because they know that this place will be everything he claims it to be. Not because of the fantastic scenery or the lively nightlife, but because they are together. Eventually they’ll go home and find a new place, a new adventure. For now though, this is exactly the life that she wants to have. 


End file.
